Summers in the central Indian city of Raipur have always been agonisingly hot, but a spate of heatwaves over the past decade has made them even more unbearable. Extreme temperatures – combined with regular power cuts – make this a serious threat to public health in the city, especially for its poorest communities.
Abhijit Bhattacharya, a resident of Raipur and community mobiliser working in the city’s slums, set out to devise a back-up generator to solve the problem. He bought a motorcycle battery from the market, an inexpensive Chinese solar panel – also available locally – and added a few wires and converters. This simple contraption cost him £50 and allows his family to enjoy uninterrupted solar power; enough to run a fan as well as a lightbulb. He is now crowdsourcing funds to make this a viable social enterprise.
Around the world, people like Bhattacharya are creating locally relevant innovations to improve their lives and limit the impacts of a changing climate. Their search for local solutions through an unstructured, bottom-up approach is common enough to have its own word in many parts of the world. Indians call it jugaad, Brazilians say gambiarra, Chinese use zizhu chuangxin and Kenyans know it as jua kali. In English, we use “frugal”, “bottom-up” or “autonomous innovation” to describe inventions like the generator. These ingenious solutions address local problems, come from non-experts through trial and error, and are “good enough” rather than perfect.
Our research, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, shows development organisations must pay more attention to this type of innovation as a powerful strategy to build resilience in lower-income countries.
This is because different kinds of disasters combine to bring new problems, or exacerbate existing problems. Yet the people who are most vulnerable often lack the resources to deliver scientifically robust solutions for enhancing resilience. Therefore, our increasingly uncertain and resource-constrained world demands autonomous innovations that are flexible, frugal and instinct-driven, to function through disturbances.
Crucially, in developing countries communities are usually the first responders in most emergencies. They need to be able to innovate to cope until help arrives – this could be the difference between life and death, between resilience and vulnerability.
Despite our best efforts, we remain uncertain about how our changing climate will affect us. There will always be situations for which you cannot fully prepare, regardless of whether governments take proactive action. Supporting the ability of communities to innovate autonomously helps tackle this uncertainty.
Development organisations interested in building resilience should support – or at least not hinder – the ability of communities to innovate autonomously. Our research found four key factors that allow autonomous innovation to take place:
- Strong social networks to generate ideas
- A culture that favours creativity and experimentation
- A market for autonomous innovation
- Political environments that incentivise innovation, for example with finance, awards or patents
Development organisations can help create these conditions through training, finance and advocating policy reform. But these efforts will work best if they are part of an existing portfolio of resilience-building activities. Internally, development organisations could ensure their staff are trained to recognise and support potential innovators they may encounter.
Grants could support programmes that create a positive environment for autonomous innovation, while loans and equity investment could scale up innovations. Competitions and challenge funds – like USAid’s development innovation ventures – can also find and support the best new ideas, but they need to be accessible to local innovators. An English-language competition hosted online will not help a Hindi-speaking innovator without access to the internet.
Some organisations already recognise the value of autonomous innovations for resilience. Practical Action supported indigenous communities in the Peruvian Andes to find a local solution to food shortages caused by bouts of extremely cold weather.
An externally led response might have led to these communities importing food or relocating. Instead, Practical Action helped them to rediscover an ancient process of cultivating native potato varieties that can survive temperatures as low as -35°C. In this way, communities have found a solution that is aligned with their culture and diet to survive extreme weather.
In the sustainable development goals, the UN commits the world to make major progress on building the resilience of poor and vulnerable communities by 2030. Yet this will hinge not only on formal programmes designed to reduce risk, but also on harnessing the ability of ordinary people to devise creative and locally relevant solutions to tackle serious, global problems.
- Aditya Bahadur and Julian Doczi are researchers at the Overseas Development Institute