Future of Rural Innovation with Thabiso Blak Mashaba

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Source: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/shake-up-the-world/episodes/Future-of-Rural-Innovation—Thabiso-Blak-Mashaba-efc8bk

Description

Thabiso is double major degree holder in Economics and Accounting from the University of Botswana. He is a completing global master’s degree in development practice programme (MDP) student under the prestigious Socio-Economic Development, Botswana Insurance Holdings Limited Trust Professor Thomas Tlou scholarship, with the same institution.

Thabiso is also a strategist, cultural economist, arts trainer and policymaker. He sits on the Botswana Confederation of Commerce, Industry and Manpower Youth in Business Sector High Level Consultative Council. He is the Interim Chairperson of the Arterial Network Botswana Chapter, Brand Ambassador of the Botswana Creative Industries Focus Group and he also sits on the National Human Resource Development Council’s Cultural and Creative Industry Sector Committee as a member representing Private Sector. Thabiso is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the fast growing IDIN Micro Grant Funded These Hands Global, Social and Sustainable Enterprise (THESE HANDS NETWORK).     

He is an IDDS Zambia 2013 Alumnus and Facilitator of the UNDP and Botswana Innovation Hub‘s Annual Social Good Summit since 2013. Thabiso is also an Ashoka Change Makers Social Intrapreneurship for Innovation in Health Wellness Course Graduate, Lead Partinizer for Africa region, and IDDS Dkar 2015 and IDDS Botswana 2016 Lead Organizer.   These Hands was started in 2015 by Thabiso to help diversify Botswana’s economy and to promote continued gains in human development. These Hands recognizes that the people of Botswana demonstrate extraordinary artistic, creative, and entrepreneurial tendencies and that this creates many opportunities for economic transformation. As a result, they aim to mobilize this talent to transform Botswana into a knowledge economy.

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Shreyas: Let me just start. Your own journey so far - if you could give a bit of an introduction about your own upbringing in Botswana and how you got into running this organization as well. That would be interesting to start with.

BLAK: Hello everyone. My name is BLAK, but everybody just calls me BLAK and it’s an acronym I actually gave myself - B-L-A-K - and it stands for “I’m Black and I’m Loud and I’m Keen to make a difference.” So it comes from something.

I was born in Botswana to a mother whose mother was sort of a refugee from Namibia, from the Herero clan. She settled first in a refugee camp and then, back in those days, the laws in Botswana allowed that after some time you could be naturalized and become a citizen. So she was naturalized and I was born and raised by this woman and her kids who were struggling - they were poor basically - but she always made sure that when we had to go to school we looked like all other kids. You couldn’t tell where we woke up from or what we ate that morning. We looked like all other kids and she valued education a lot, so she always encouraged us to ask questions even when we got home. Even though she wouldn’t know the answers, she would try and figure it out.

This whole upbringing led to my mother starting off her first work as a social worker. As a social worker working for the government in local authorities, she was transferred from one village to another across the country, so I grew up literally in almost all parts of Botswana. She was working with Botswana’s social welfare program and facilitating it at the grassroots level - supporting orphans who need support, destitute people who need support, juvenile delinquents who need support, just impoverished people who needed support.

Everywhere she would go, I would see the poverty gap. Because she and my father were working for the local authority, which is government, I kept asking them, “How come these guys…” For example, when I was doing kindergarten and staying in some far away village in the desert called Hukuntsi, I would walk there every morning and work with a group of San community kids who stayed in the clinic hospital compound for that village. They would go to this public kindergarten with me, but they would be wearing their traditional regalia - the girls would be wearing traditional leather bras and traditional leather skirts, and it would be real winter time. I’d be wearing a beanie, gloves, bomber jacket, sweater, pants, more pants, socks, and shoes.

Every time I’d come from school, I would have given each one of my friends something of mine so they could also keep warm, and my mother would scold me: “Why did you do that?” I’d tell her, “Well, I felt like my friends were cold and I had all these things, so I felt I could share.”

In the desert it gets really cold during winter time, especially in the mornings and evenings. In the early mornings when we were going to school before the sun was really good, these guys would just be walking literally underdressed. For the boys it was even worse because it’s just a traditional loincloth and that’s it. They would be holding a stone that they left in fire, tossing it from one hand to the other just to keep warm, but it wasn’t sufficient.

I used to question all these things and ask my mom, “How come this person doesn’t have a bomber jacket? How come you didn’t get him a bomber jacket and you got me one?” She kept telling me, “It’s governance, the system is like this.” So I’ve always questioned the inequality between different people who are in the same zone.

Over time, as I got to university, I studied economics and accounting. There was a time when one lecturer of mine walked into the room and said, “For an open economy to exist, there needs to be perfect information.” First I asked what is perfect information, so she said, “If we’re going to design a policy to deal with malaria, for example, as we design it as policy makers, all the information that we are designing it with so that the people can actually own it needs to be coming from the people so that they can own it and run with it and are able to actually sustain themselves off that policy.”

Shreyas: When you say open information should be made available to the people, do you mean that the information should be accessible by the people, or what is the final interpretation?

BLAK: When we say an economy, we’re talking about a mixed economy which has government influence but also has a market deciding the prices of things. When you make policies, you need to make sure that the policies are actually going to have an impact. People should own them. For example, if you’re making a COVID-19 policy right now to say everyone should wear masks, but if you know the situation on the ground, you can choose to say, “Okay, those that can afford to make masks for themselves or buy masks, please buy them. But for everybody else who we know can’t afford them…” - that’s a full problem.

But if you’re just going to do a top-down, blanket approach for everyone, that never really solves anything and inequality persists.

I then took it upon myself and said, “What’s the one thing that’s not actually working in this economy that I can try and create perfect information around and then see if actually, if you create perfect information, things will actually move towards a better trajectory?”

I had always loved being in music, so I felt like we have only produced one international DJ in Botswana - DJ Fresh. He left law school in Botswana to go to broadcasting school in South Africa, and he got there and is doing great things. The atmosphere in South Africa allowed him to flourish. So I realized, “Oh, maybe if we recreate some things to be able to actually support the environment that DJs could flourish in Botswana, then we could possibly get more international DJs.”

I did a DJ symposium where I had DJ Fresh and other international DJs come and engage with our DJs, sharing professional tips. We used those professional tips, but thinking of the participants who were the local DJs - he’s an icon, so everybody is inspired by him. When he guides them on how they should get gigs, how they should make sure they always have a contract, how they should prepare professionally, and all those things, we packaged those rules and they became the creative industry policy.

Shreyas: I’m trying to find the connection between economics and the creative industry. I could see there was motivation for you to develop the creative industry, but I’m trying to understand the economics point of view.

BLAK: With the economics background, I realized I’m not a good DJ, but I have the skill of economics and nobody’s going to do the administrative, educational, and facilitation work. So I took it upon myself to be the one to bridge this perfect information between government and the entire creative industry, because I saw the creative industry as an opportunity to diversify the economy of Botswana from mining dependency and tourism. It could create more businesses, more self-employment, more jobs for the youth who are currently unemployed, and jobs for informal sector people in rural communities who are currently not recognized.

I took it upon myself to create that perfect information. First I lobbied government from the DJ point of view just to test the waters with one sub-sector, and after its success, I grew it into the entire music industry. Eventually I started my master’s program so I could do a thesis to measure the contribution of the creative industries to GDP because I needed that number to convince government as to why they need to create a budget and support the creative industries with a real budget as opposed to treating them as a pastime.

Shreyas: So you did your master’s to push the government to take a major policy to support the creative industry?

BLAK: Exactly. If the creative industries are contributing nine million US dollars to the GDP, then they should get proportional support so they are boosted and can actually keep contributing and sustaining the economy, but more importantly creating jobs and having real impact on the ground.

In doing this during my master’s in development practice, our professor shared an opportunity in Zambia from MIT called the International Development Design Summit (IDDS). I thought, “Maybe this summit is about people gathering and thinking about how policies could be designed differently.” I was excited, applied, and never got a response until the 11th hour when they told me I got it but needed to find my own transport. My university paid for my bus fare and I took a 24-hour bus ride from Botswana to Zambia.

I got to Zambia and realized this summit was about people making technologies with communities for communities. It was practical as opposed to the policy influence direction I was coming from. It was participatory design, but participatory design not as informants but as designers themselves and as people with knowledge themselves - design with, which eventually was empowering them so they can design by themselves.

I really valued that and took it as something that if I brought it back home and reapplied it in the context of Botswana, I could make a lot of headway.

I met a guy from India there over a smoke break - Sagnik. We bonded first because we were the only social scientists there. He had a social development background, I was economics and accounting. Others were from design and engineering, plus local community members who were pastors, teachers, health workers, just community members.

In my team, I was working with old women in the Luangwa district in a village called Monze. The challenge was that they weave baskets and mats from palm trees, but logistically, they were not getting real value for their money because market agents would come to the village and buy them for cheap, then take them to Lusaka and sell them for exorbitant prices.

Shreyas: So the farmers are not getting much profit?

BLAK: They were getting money but spending a lot of time, and it didn’t really help them while the middlemen were getting most of the fruits of their hard work. They were buying high-quality products for cheap and selling them in Lusaka for high prices.

We went into Luangwa to co-create with them and design solutions. They eventually designed about four solutions: a stripper ring which helped them strip their leaves evenly, a weaving stand which helped them weave with uniformity instead of just holding things on their thighs, and other technologies. We eventually exhibited them.

As Sagnik and I were leaving, I said, “Hey man, Facebook is a very good tool. What if we did something like Facebook but strictly dedicated to the work that we’ve just done with these people?” - to keep having conversations about technology, keep reminding people about the co-design process, linking those in America and India with those on the ground.

Shreyas: A social network of grassroots innovators?

BLAK: Grassroots innovators plus the technical people that can support them to move their products forward. He said to me, “But these people don’t have internet,” and I’m like, “Yeah, but can you access internet without using internet?” We laughed about it, but that’s where These Hands was born.

These Hands was first born as a social media platform to facilitate co-creation between grassroots innovators and those that have internet access and technical skills to support them.

Shreyas: How do you possibly use internet without using internet?

BLAK: A USSD platform allows you to access internet information but not actually using internet. You can use your phone - a 2G cellphone. USSD just charges you - if you go in for two weeks it’ll charge you 50 cents, and if you go in for a whole month it’ll charge you a dollar of your internet data credit. This was a good solution.

We developed it and validated it by applying for the Orange Africa Social Venture Prize. We won Botswana, then went to the Africa Finals. It didn’t win but was validated because it was in the top 11 of all African solutions.

Shreyas: What was the vision or objective behind These Hands itself?

BLAK: Basically, it was to facilitate communication because Sagnik and I felt bad that we were going to not be able to talk and support these guys going forward. We said, “Maybe if we create this platform where we can use internet and they can use USSD and we can still communicate…” If we used SMS it was still going to charge them more money, but the USSD platform and subscription model we had in mind was more affordable.

When we designed and launched it online, to launch it offline - the USSD platform - we had to partner with a mobile technology company. Even after winning and coming back, it doesn’t make sense to ask for a billing platform when you have no users yet. When we won that award in 2015, we were only training about 30 people, so we had to go to a larger scale.

That’s when we pivoted our business model to focus largely on physical trainings and setting up innovation centers because this would allow us to populate numbers of people. When we’re ready to go back to the mobile network provider, we’ll actually have the numbers.

Shreyas: So Botswana alone has continued with the philosophy of MIT D-Lab?

BLAK: Exactly. Throughout this whole time we are implementing partners of MIT D-Lab and the International Development Innovation Network, so everything is still based on that philosophy.

Shreyas: Is it possible to explain a bit for people who are not aware of this whole approach and why it’s something very important for grassroots mobilization?

BLAK: The International Development Innovation Network philosophy of co-creation is such that we do not as designers or engineers see ourselves as messiahs to people’s problems. We see ourselves as possible technical support and we value everybody whether they have formal education or qualifications, because everybody has knowledge and contribution towards addressing problems, particularly when they know the problem better than those coming from outside.

Even myself staying in the city in the same country with the same people who have the problem - I would never know their problem better than them. For example, if you were to ask me if I understand the problem of those guys I used to walk with to kindergarten, I would probably say yes, but I would probably not be telling the truth because they know it better.

If somebody was to come to me and say, “What is the problem in this village?” I think it’s best to ask those guys as opposed to me, because the perspective I would give you would probably have a modern touch because I would be coming with expectations from my upbringing. I might say, “If we had a TV station here in this village…” because I would have one from the town where I’m coming from, “then maybe things would improve.” But that’s for me. For the people who are actually at the grassroots, they have their form of entertainment, and maybe if you facilitate that for them, it would actually be more amazing as opposed to giving them a TV which they don’t even value.

Shreyas: We can couple that knowledge - you bring some technical knowledge because of your upbringing and modernity, but they have indigenous knowledge, and usually beautiful things come out of that.

BLAK: Exactly. We have seen them come out of that in the 62 countries that we have worked in and from the thousand-plus innovators that we have now in the network.

These Hands basically - in our trainings we always remind our participants that the product or the technology is just the vehicle. The actual thing we want them to grasp the most is the process, because once they own the process, they can run and address their own livelihood challenges by themselves without having to depend on us coming back and forth.

Shreyas: It’s something like “teach someone to fish and they will be fishing for a lifetime.”

BLAK: Exactly. If you make the process clear, they don’t become dependent. Even after they produce prototypes and have actual products, we don’t actually run businesses for them. We guide them around the co-design process so they can turn it into a community business that they can use to sustain themselves.

The models differ from project to project based on context. Sometimes they use rental models where a person from the innovation center can rent out a technology to community members because they know they can’t afford to buy it, but they can rent it, use it for their work, sell their products for a certain price, and pay back the rental fee.

This is the uniqueness of this work - we see different solutions which are borrowed from open source ideas but are born into new types of technologies which are contextual, addressing immediate livelihood challenges of the people that are actually designing them, not designed somewhere and then shipped to these people saying “use this, this will work for you.”

It helps them understand the entire value chain and other people can focus on one element of the entire process of getting the project to market, as opposed to just deploying something from outside. Because then you’re just training an NGO to go around supplying things to households, and the households don’t know how it works, and if it gets damaged, they have to depend on somebody coming from somewhere to fix it.

Shreyas: So they should be self-reliant now, they shouldn’t be dependent on NGOs or the government.

BLAK: Exactly. In our type of philosophy, we design with them so they can actually get the skills and master the process. As they stay by themselves, they become designers by themselves and can co-create amongst themselves as a community, giving each other ideas and solving their own challenges because they know them better. We keep facilitating by helping them with materials here and there, bringing technical students and faculty here and there, just so the project keeps moving forward.

Shreyas: One of the biggest challenges is motivation, right?

BLAK: As we know, the world is motivated by cash, and it’s not a bad thing - everybody’s in survival mode. If you know Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, if you are at the base, you’re basically saying, “I’m afraid of death, so anything that will help me eat that day, I will do it.”

Those people who are in fear of failure are those wanting to succeed so much. Those people in fear of death are those wanting to just survive - these are the people at the base of the pyramid. What we do is try and ensure consistency in our support system, because income from technology development will take a long time. You develop a prototype, iterate it, develop it completely, and take it to market, but in that time you still have to eat something.

Many of the people we work with are indigenous in their cultures and crafts, so they make arts and crafts. We had engagements with MIT Museum where we could try and sell some of their crafts, and in the Netherlands with Tess, a fair trade store. When I was there, I negotiated with them - it wasn’t consignment per se, but we were able to send crafts so people could see them and buy them. As they buy them, they keep their markup and send us the value back, and we pass that to innovators as short-term income.

The reason we set them up into innovation centers - these are just workshop spaces, not like Silicon Valley, but they provide the same context: a place where people can meet, exchange ideas, access materials for free, access technical support for free, and be able to move that technology forward. This keeps them engaged.

For example, the one in Gantsi has an ICT space with donated computers, internet, and a printer. It offers printing services to the community, teaches community members basic ICT literacy skills, and teaches them research skills about how to research their technology so they can develop it further without depending on other people.

But the biggest challenge is having consistent financing to get this running.

Shreyas: That is sustainability and the financial model.

BLAK: You can’t charge people exorbitant prices for printing like in cities because they can’t afford it, but you also can’t give it for free. So we always have to play a catch-22 pricing strategy.

For example, with all our innovation centers, we don’t charge people anything, but once the project is done and ready to go to market, that’s when we start charging them 10% of every sale.

Shreyas: So it’s free until you make money, but then if you can make money, we make money with you.

BLAK: But we’re not going to be milking you for a lifetime. We do it for three years, and we’re charging it per sale, not on profits, not burdening you too much. Then we let you go.

Shreyas: That’s an interesting model.

BLAK: But we also realize that the numbers in Botswana are a disadvantage to bring in revenue. We’re basically 2.2 million people. I service a target of 850,000 people. We’ve so far reached about 5,000 people in terms of just reach - people who know about what we do. We’ve trained about 400 people and have about five innovation centers in five districts. It’s good progress, but we struggle to get sustainable financing.

What we have done is that in Zambia and Tanzania - neighboring countries that also have MIT D-Lab training and IDIN network membership - we decided to come together and set up a consortium. This consortium was given a grant by the Finnish government.

Now what we will be doing is expanding our work in-country within Botswana, Zambia, and Tanzania, but also expanding the philosophy to other southern African countries. We found that our coming together was a better way of attracting resources and sustaining the consistency that we seek so our innovators can actually stay at these rural innovation centers and keep working on projects until they’re able to make the right income.

Shreyas: Does this consortium help the rural innovators in Zambia?

BLAK: Several things brought us together. First, we needed to pool resources - if we are together, we run for impact and then share our markets. In Botswana, we need a lot of agricultural technology implements because we’re quite a desert, so anything that could assist rural farming. In Zambia and Tanzania, they actually produce these things.

So for national exhibitions and fairs, we bring our Zambian and Tanzanian counterparts to exhibit here because here they have market demand. In Zambia and Tanzania, everybody is producing them, so it’s saturated. So Zambia gets their advantage by joining along with Botswana in this consortium - they’re able to sell their products in Botswana.

Botswana produces something from the Mokolwane fruit - it’s so hard that you can make jewelry out of it. You can’t even crack it; they had to make a technology to make piercings on it to cut it. It’s a very hard shell and very slippery. I’ll send you a gift of one of the jewelry pieces one of these days.

That’s basically the philosophy of why we came together - also for skills exchange. Some innovators in Zambia are more skilled at certain things than the ones in Botswana or Tanzania, so we pool all this knowledge together to avoid depending too much on MIT D-Lab and have our own thing which we’re running locally with the same understanding, but sharing skills and technical abilities for better progress in southern Africa.

This is where we are going with it. Unfortunately, we didn’t start yet because of corona, but post-COVID we are hitting the road again and will eventually expand into Namibia. Hopefully we’ll be able to recruit you to attend IDDS Namibia 2021, so look out for that.

Shreyas: I think this would be nice if we can expand to a larger number of African countries. I think every country would benefit by such a network - there’s always cross-transfer of ideas and everyone could access technologies and make them contextual.

BLAK: We decided to start small and then once the thing is working, scale it up. Luckily, as we were getting the grant, we also had to get a financier because the grant they can only give us cash after implementation. We had to find a financier who could give us funds in advance.

We found a financial corporation bank which was born in Botswana but is spread into most African countries. They have wide reach within the southern African market, East Africa, and West Africa. We’ve gone into a corporate strategic investment partnership with them post the grant where we will explore growing with them to other countries within southern Africa where they have footprint, and eventually to other African countries where they have footprint.

Once we have this growth, we can see how we can link up with NEPAD and AU and other organizations to buttress it as a philosophy in other countries where we want footprint.

Shreyas: How does the participation of local governance or larger bodies get involved?

BLAK: They are key partners in the sense that first, you are servicing their communities - communities which they are mandated over by the Constitution to take care of. For you to access community leaders like chiefs, village development councils, and all these other organizations which we largely partner with so we can set up the things we set up with these communities free of charge, you have to have that government backing.

We don’t necessarily depend on them for funding - where they can fund, great, but where they can facilitate our credibility to communities and also to our donors… For example, because we are members of the Botswana Innovation Hub here in Botswana, which is a government entity, the government becomes a reference.

Shreyas: So what would be the manifestation in terms of outcomes?

BLAK: The manifestation is to largely produce about five selling technologies that will be helping to improve people’s lives within the SADC region, empower as many people as possible within the four countries to own the co-design process and use it in their daily lives to improve their own challenges, and start setting up a secretariat so that eventually it operates independently without the influence of the three entities.

Basically, the revenue from their sales will help set up the secretariat of the consortium - help pay office space, secretariat costs, and all that, which will keep facilitating the support of all these technologies and programs.

It is a regional block of the global IDIN network, and we are planning to set up one around Oceania, Southeast Asia, India, and the Mediterranean because that’s another space within the IDIN network that hasn’t been explored in terms of creating regional capacity.

We have many network members in those spaces, but they don’t have a core joining thing which allows them to meet, gather, exchange ideas, support each other. I’m currently working on that. I have applied for a fellowship in New Zealand - hopefully I’ll make it and start from New Zealand and expand to nearby places. Hopefully by that time you will also be back in India and we can see how we collaborate.

I believe that the work that you do is similar to the work that we do. I see a lot of convergence in terms of your model, in terms of the labs and how you can really bring about this decentralized philosophy of people coming together and building things for their own good.

Shreyas: That’s something I also deeply resonate with in terms of my organization as well.

BLAK: We don’t really run these innovation labs ourselves - the community members run them. We just facilitate that they run them for their better success. From time to time we ask them to send us reports so we see what they are lacking, what they have achieved, and if they need extra support, we can find either technical, financial, or material support and make sure they have those things so they don’t get demoralized and give up.

Many people ask me how I’m making money from this. I hope when we launch the USSD platform it will make us revenue when people are using it. Right now we’re hoping that the technologies eventually get to sale point and we can have some revenue from that, but that’s not my main goal right now.

My main goal is to set the fire in action, and once the fire is in action… I’m using the example of fire because, for example, with bush fires - if it starts and the fire really catches, it’s very difficult to stop something that is on fire.

This is my main goal - to just go around sparking fires, sparking fires, sparking fires, and then bringing these fires together so the fire becomes very strong and unstoppable. When we make money, it’ll come, but it’s not the main thing that gives me joy.

When I see an old lady who has never used a saw use a saw for the first time and gets excited that she chipped a block of wood from a piece of wood, it gets me excited. Then she moves on to do it for other people and gets even more confident. I go home to sleep and I’m like, “Yeah, if I go back to that village next time and that lady tells me, ‘Hey, I built myself that wooden thing there by myself because of skills…’ because we believe that everybody has these skills. Some people are afraid of them because of patriarchal laws - just natural laws where certain things are said to be for men. But once you activate them in women, they realize these things are for everyone, and even the men start showing respect like, ‘This lady does it better than I do, so let her do it.’”

We’ve seen how co-creation led to breaking taboos. For example, in Zambia we’ve seen how co-creation led to breaking a menstruation taboo within the village.

Shreyas: How did it break the taboo?

BLAK: In a household in Zambia, when a young girl got her menstrual period, she would run to her mother saying, “Mama, mama, I’m bleeding.” The mother would - because the father is a provider of resources - never really want to talk about it with the father because it was a taboo for men to talk about menstruation.

Using co-creation, they decided to address this challenge because there was a lack of sanitary pads or people being able to afford sanitary pads for young girls. What they did was decide to make a reusable pad from local material within the community.

In order for men to come on board - because men love money - they put them in charge of being sales agents to sell so they can make money. They put the women and girls in the workshop so they can be the ones sewing these pads and producing them in large quantities.

It eventually led to one community member being the champion of these pads - we called him Mr. Flying Pads. He went all over Zambia selling pads, which was very weird to many people, but he was also helping to break the taboo of talking about menstruation as a man, and it made things very easy and harmonious in the community.

There’s beauty in this co-creation process and I value it so much and defend it with my life.

Here in Botswana, we had a young boy, 21 years old, who loved bicycles from a young age and liked changing bicycle wheels and fixing them. He applied for one of our summits in Gantsi and applied to be part of a project called the Deep Sand Wheelchair Project.

Shreyas: So basically it’s a wheelchair that can move in rough terrains or within the deep sand of the Kalahari?

BLAK: Exactly, because the current ones that are meant for rough terrains get stuck very easily in the desert. He and his team members worked on that and he fell in love with wheelchairs. He was very fortunate because he was working with a World Health Organization expert and a lecturer for wheelchair design at MIT D-Lab.

They eventually made a nice Deep Sand Wheelchair which is pedal-powered, has a front wheel and two BMX bicycle double tires on the sides. This guy doesn’t need anybody to push him - he just pedals. It was a unique accessory kit that they added to an already existing rough rider wheelchair.

The guy got super passionate about wheelchairs and wanted to take this wheelchair from prototype until eventually donating it to the person they were working with. The user was involved in the design from the beginning.

But there was a hiccup - he couldn’t just let this guy use the wheelchair because he’s not a basic level service provider or advanced service provider. A wheelchair is not like a bicycle; it’s a medical device, so it needs to be checked by physiotherapists for the right medical approval.

I said, “We work with iCare in Zambia and they do basic level service provision training, but they can also teach you how to make a proper wheelchair because the one you just made here, you didn’t really bend any steel - you just took an existing wheelchair and modified it.”

I was fortunate to find him funding and he went to Zambia. He came back knowing how to make wheelchairs and now with basic level service provision. He went back to the village, got to the nearest physiotherapist, and donated it to this young guy that he was working with.

From there, he wanted to become the person who will make wheelchairs and become a medical approver. There’s basic level and advanced level - advanced level is usually for physiotherapists, basic level is for the designer themselves to know that at this level and angle, when I do these basic tests, the wheelchair is fine.

Shreyas: This relentless spirit to bring this to reality.

BLAK: He finished the prototype and donated it to his friend because by this time they were now friends and brothers - they had worked together for a very long time. This was in 2016, so four years ago, and he donated it in 2018, so it took him about two years to actually get it deployed.

He had approached the government to go around and maybe modify and repair some of their wheelchairs. They’re still in back and forth negotiation with him, but he was fortunate last year to win a grant to be able to set up a workshop where now he will become… and the biggest buyer of wheelchairs is government, so they’ll have no choice but to eventually come back to him.

We have linked him up with other people in the region who can be his support system, and he still has contact with that World Health Organization expert and the MIT lecturer. He’s now on his own, has registered his business - it’s called Rikú.

Shreyas: What’s the name? I will probably search it out myself.

BLAK: It’s R-I-K-U-H-U. Now he’s running Rikú. I heard from him recently just to say what’s up, not to really demand or ask anything from me, and I said what’s up back.

These are some of the things that give me joy. There are some people that come and get inspiration from co-creating with some of these communities. Some people from the community become themselves trainers and innovation center managers of these communities that we have.

Some of them don’t have any formal school education. We took them for a train-of-trainers so that we can pass skills to them so that everybody who keeps coming for support at their innovation centers, they are able to technically assist them as well because they now know more of the process and some technical tools.

These are some of the successes, and for me I don’t measure success in terms of money. I measure it in terms of impact metrics, so my impact metric is just happiness.

Shreyas: You’re not measuring in terms of the number of products they’re making or businesses - maybe that’s a tangible one, but probably the very fact that they are having confidence in their own creative potential is itself a big change.

BLAK: Exactly. If people are happy and confident about owning the process and running with the process for anything and feeling they can see themselves out of the challenges they are going through, then I believe I have success. Other people measure it differently and I don’t have a problem with that. I try to satisfy all the measurements, but that’s my main one.

Shreyas: It’s a very easy thing if you do it the way you do it. I’m curious about challenges - have you encountered situations where there were conflicts within communities?

BLAK: For example, I once tried a training in a village which had about three different tribes, and it looked like one tribe was dominant over the two other tribes. Within the training, sometimes it starts off and you’d think, “Okay, these are probably just team dynamics,” and then you start seeing that it’s becoming tribalistic when there are some groups which are more dominant over others and they start dismissing ideas of others.

We don’t dismiss ideas of others in our world. When such things start sparking and becoming consistent during the training, I can even stop the training. I take everybody into a circle and take everybody’s thoughts, and if it continues persistently even within that circle when we are talking, I can stop the training and leave them with a message: “Unite, because you are one and you are faced with the same challenge in the same village. Once you are united, you have my details. You can engage me back. I’ll be glad to come back and continue.”

They thought I was joking, but I went ahead and did it. Just recently they started calling: “Okay, we have united now. We understood what you meant. Please come back.”

Shreyas: That’s a very good message. The logo of your organization itself with “these hands” seems to be about uniting together.

BLAK: These Hands is all about that. It’s about not the one billion mouths of people that we have to feed, but the two billion hands that are ready to engage and make change. It’s people engaging - everybody who is willing to engage either with a technical person or with a person in their community to address a challenge which they are faced with without having to depend on people from somewhere to come and solve problems for them or governments to come and solve problems for them.

That’s basically what These Hands is - self-reliance. The co-design process activates that spirit of self-reliance and using your available resources to make a difference for yourself with the limited resources that you have.

Shreyas: How does the expansion work? You mentioned you have presence in several countries.

BLAK: We have a presence in Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Botswana, and Zambia. With the consortium, we’ll be trying to expand into other southern African countries and then eventually reach other African countries.

I already have some partners who are ready to collaborate in Tunisia - they own a makerspace in the city called L’Space. Basically they run a space like Silicon Valley in Tunisia run by youth, but they like the approach that we use to address immediate rural community challenges. So we are working on a future collaboration with them.

And with you as well - I hope to collaborate actively. I think there should be more work, especially with what’s happening in Africa and with the organization and many other players. I think there should be a similar movement in India as well.

Shreyas: I equally follow your work and it inspires me a lot. One of the things that people don’t get is delivering this pedagogy to kids is so difficult, particularly when you get them to use a drilling machine in uncontrolled environments - not at a shop or school where they’re told what to do. In your case, you tell them but don’t really guide them like a teacher would, and then they have fun in the process but make actual things.

BLAK: With elderly people it’s easy but also difficult. The easy part is they can understand when you start, and especially if you keep it fun, they get engaged. But the difficulty is it’s very difficult for an old person to unlearn what they already know and learn something new.

Shreyas: I think conditioning might be a challenge for them.

BLAK: Exactly. It’s so set in stone that changing even basic things or the way they approach things would be different. That’s why the consistency of supporting them and showing them the process in action is very key, as opposed to a child. If you show a child the light once, they’ll be curious about it and keep trying to get to that light.

But with an elderly person, if you show them the light once, that was it. But I also think there are interesting possibilities of co-creation of children with adults. That’s why I see the opportunity, particularly for what you’ve already started in India, because it’s a matter of riding on the wave that you’ve created but then bringing corporate India on board, institutional academia in India on board, students on board, and then rural community elders being led by these young self-taught designers.

Shreyas: Adults and children and also designers and engineers all come together and bring together something valuable for the people.

BLAK: That’s what we encourage because that’s co-creation. You can learn many things from a child because they’re super curious, so they poke and prod many things on a daily basis and learn new things from that. I know, for example, for me to learn that electricity really carries current and will shock you, I put my tongue in a cable socket once when I was a kid and realized I should never do that.

Shreyas: It’s an experience which you can’t help but learn from.

BLAK: They’re more experiential learners as opposed to adults, but adults also have experiential learning from having gone through the whole process from kid to young adult to adult. It’s a whole combination of values and mindsets which, if you bring together, you get these wild, beautiful ideas that spark.

It’s the philosophy of what we call the IDDS spirit - International Development Design Summit. It’s practicing development but also using design as thinking, and it’s a summit that produces actual prototypes, not papers from conferences where you publish papers and nobody ever does anything. It’s almost like an international association of name-droppers - you just publish papers and where is the real change? Sometimes it’s lost in a lot of papers. Of course research and academia is also important, but this is practice - applied research.

This was Amy Smith’s philosophy. She’s the founder and director of MIT D-Lab. She founded MIT D-Lab after having grown up in India and actually staying and teaching in Botswana as a Peace Corps volunteer here, then going back and starting the D-Lab class which was just a class going to Haiti. As it kept making more impact, she grew it into the MIT D-Lab school and started having courses, but it still carries the same philosophy of the Haiti class - going to co-create, not going to be messiahs, going to offer technical support but also learning from what indigenous knowledge can teach.

Shreyas: With COVID-19, everything has been stopped, right?

BLAK: IDDS - everything has been stopped. We have postponed our activities as of now with COVID-19, and everything will start again in 2021.

Shreyas: I will leave this at a high note. It’s been a nice time talking to you, BLAK. I truly appreciate the chat.

BLAK: Nobody ever wants to chat with me about my work or what I do or why I do it, so this is a very special thing for me. I really wanted to have a thoughtful conversation with you, going really deep into what you’re doing. I feel it really resonates with what I’m doing as well, so I could connect well with your work. It’s nice to have you on this podcast and I’ll hopefully be sharing this widely.

BLAK: Good to have you, my brother.

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For more information about These Hands and BLAK’s work in rural innovation and co-creation, listeners can find details about their projects and the International Development Innovation Network through MIT D-Lab’s resources and the southern African consortium initiatives mentioned in the episode.