India science model for Africa nations
India science model for Africa nations
OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
The bamboo windmill designed by the two Assam brothers. Picture by NIF
New Delhi, March 3: Zimbabwe’s science minister Heneri Dzinotyiweyi has signed a pact to help his country draw lessons from a grassroots innovation programme in India that has commercialised, among other inventions, a bamboo windmill from Assam.
Under the agreement, signed today at an India-Africa science conference, India’s National Innovation Foundation (NIF) will share with Zimbabwe its experience in scouting, documenting and adding value to the grassroots innovations it has chased across the country for two decades.
Zimbabwe is among several African countries that have signalled their intentions to replicate India’s institutional models for science and research, including the NIF-like pursuit of innovation outside of academic and research laboratories.
Egypt and Mozambique also want to develop similar projects.
“We hope to share the way we find innovations from the grassroots and provide some technologies as relevant to Africa as they are to India,” said Anil Gupta, professor at IIM Ahmedabad and executive vice-chairperson of the NIF.
A bamboo windmill designed by two brothers, Mohammad Mehtar Hussain and Mushtaq Ahamad, in Assam is among grassroots innovations that, Gupta said, have drawn the interest of several African delegates at the conference.
The original version of the bamboo windmill developed by the brothers to water their paddy crop cost only Rs 5,000 but a modified version priced at about Rs 60,000 is currently being used for salt production in coastal Gujarat, Gupta said.
“We would like to try and take advantage of the NIF’s experience and its range of innovations,” Dzinotyiweyi said, after signing the agreement with the NIF. “This also tells us science and technology doesn’t have to be left entirely to (trained) scientists or engineers,” Dzinotyiweyi told The Telegraph.
India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research with a network of about 38 laboratories across the country has emerged a model for Mozambique. “We have about 27 laboratories in Mozambique involved in agriculture, energy, food and water research,” said Venancio Simao Massingue, the country’s science minister. “We would like to build a network along the lines of the CSIR,” Massingue told The Telegraph on the sidelines of the conference.
Sections of India’s science policy makers are hoping such initiatives will help strengthen ties with African countries at a time when China has established significant commercial interests in Africa. The CSIR, for example, has helped Ethiopia in leather processing technology, helping Ethiopia’s leather industry.
“We also have technologies in engineering, food processing and biotechnology that we believe could be of interest to African countries,” said Samir Brahmachari, the director general of CSIR, which plans to develop a CSIR-India Pan-Africa Innovation Centre in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
“It’ll be an innovation house to disseminate technologies across Africa,” Brahmachari said.
India has also agreed to help strengthen three regional institutions in Africa — the Institute Pasteur in Tunisia, the Institute of Mathematics and Physical Sciences, Benin, and the School of Science and Technology, Gabon, among other initiatives finalised at the India-Africa summit.
About 150 delegates from 40 African countries attended the two-day conference that concluded today.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Learning from African knowledge and innovations:
Learning from African knowledge and innovations:
Different countries are at different stages of economic growth and
development, but these stages have little to do with the growth of
local knowledge systems. Recently held conference of Science and
Technology Ministers and secretaries from over 40 countries debated
among other things, how can mutual learning take place to empower
local communities? The arrogance that prevents us from learning from
lower order people in our country comes in the way of learning from
less economically developed countries too. Honey Bee Network has
trying to dilute this resistance to learn from below for over quarter
century. It was evident when ministers from Zimbabwe and Mozambique
got into an agreement with National innovation Foundation to take help
of HBN to trigger grassroots innovation movement in their countries.
Delegates from Ethiopia, Botswana, Tanzania, Tunisia, Egypt etc., also
were very keen to join forces. One message which I stressed was the
importance of learning India will make in the process.
Let me illustrate. About ten years ago, SRISTI helped International
Fund for Agricultural Development, Rome in organizing an international
contest for grassroots innovations in 70 countries. The top award
winner was from Uganda, viz., When a farmer AUTA GRAVETAS noticed in
Uganda that the sweet potato plants in a part of field having lantana
camara on the border did not have pests incidence, he evolved a
hypothesis. Can lantana leaves help extend the shelf life of sweet
potato slices? Since a large number of people in that region survived
on sweet potato slices as a staple food when they could not afford
maize or paddy, the shelf-life of these slices was directly linked to
the food self provisioning. He had an idea. He put lantana camara
leaves in between the layers of dried slices stored for future use.
He could extend the shelf-life and food self provisioning by almost a
month and a half more. The weed became a resource. First prize,
given at Global Knowledge Conference organized in Malaysia, 2002
created a benchmark of excellence in a field where formal institutions
had not been able to develop such a low cost solution to a popular
problem. Neither lantana camara was indigenous, nor had the
knowledge been transferred by one generation to another over
centuries. Still the way of knowing was traditional, i.e., observing
an odd phenomena, discriminating, abstracting, hypothesizing, testing
and developing a robust rule or technology. National Innovation
Foundation (NIF) with the help of Honey Bee Network has scouted scores
of other uses of this plant which was introduced as an ornamental by
British colonial rulers in India and Africa more than 100 years ago.
Use of lantana camara as a pesticide for controlling pests resistant
to chemical pesticides in cotton can be a very powerful solution
across the world. The constraint can become an opportunity. This
weed has damaged large number of forest regions around the world.
The knowledge developed by an individual and/or a community over a
long period of time or in recent past at grassroots level is something
that we need to learn from.
The institutional context of such knowledge becomes evident when a
farmer like AUTA is able to experiment and a District Agriculture
Officer recognizes the merit, submits his entry for the international
competition and SRISTI is able to identify its potential and thus
contribute to its recognition by IFAD. When further work is not done
on this technology by the Ugandan scientists or international
agencies, it shows how unwilling formal institutional system still is.
Therefore, challenge is not just to learn, but also to make layers of
institutions at different levels also to learn. Indian people can and
will learn as much if not more than what our African brothers and
sisters will learn. The development has to become a two way street.
Different countries are at different stages of economic growth and
development, but these stages have little to do with the growth of
local knowledge systems. Recently held conference of Science and
Technology Ministers and secretaries from over 40 countries debated
among other things, how can mutual learning take place to empower
local communities? The arrogance that prevents us from learning from
lower order people in our country comes in the way of learning from
less economically developed countries too. Honey Bee Network has
trying to dilute this resistance to learn from below for over quarter
century. It was evident when ministers from Zimbabwe and Mozambique
got into an agreement with National innovation Foundation to take help
of HBN to trigger grassroots innovation movement in their countries.
Delegates from Ethiopia, Botswana, Tanzania, Tunisia, Egypt etc., also
were very keen to join forces. One message which I stressed was the
importance of learning India will make in the process.
Let me illustrate. About ten years ago, SRISTI helped International
Fund for Agricultural Development, Rome in organizing an international
contest for grassroots innovations in 70 countries. The top award
winner was from Uganda, viz., When a farmer AUTA GRAVETAS noticed in
Uganda that the sweet potato plants in a part of field having lantana
camara on the border did not have pests incidence, he evolved a
hypothesis. Can lantana leaves help extend the shelf life of sweet
potato slices? Since a large number of people in that region survived
on sweet potato slices as a staple food when they could not afford
maize or paddy, the shelf-life of these slices was directly linked to
the food self provisioning. He had an idea. He put lantana camara
leaves in between the layers of dried slices stored for future use.
He could extend the shelf-life and food self provisioning by almost a
month and a half more. The weed became a resource. First prize,
given at Global Knowledge Conference organized in Malaysia, 2002
created a benchmark of excellence in a field where formal institutions
had not been able to develop such a low cost solution to a popular
problem. Neither lantana camara was indigenous, nor had the
knowledge been transferred by one generation to another over
centuries. Still the way of knowing was traditional, i.e., observing
an odd phenomena, discriminating, abstracting, hypothesizing, testing
and developing a robust rule or technology. National Innovation
Foundation (NIF) with the help of Honey Bee Network has scouted scores
of other uses of this plant which was introduced as an ornamental by
British colonial rulers in India and Africa more than 100 years ago.
Use of lantana camara as a pesticide for controlling pests resistant
to chemical pesticides in cotton can be a very powerful solution
across the world. The constraint can become an opportunity. This
weed has damaged large number of forest regions around the world.
The knowledge developed by an individual and/or a community over a
long period of time or in recent past at grassroots level is something
that we need to learn from.
The institutional context of such knowledge becomes evident when a
farmer like AUTA is able to experiment and a District Agriculture
Officer recognizes the merit, submits his entry for the international
competition and SRISTI is able to identify its potential and thus
contribute to its recognition by IFAD. When further work is not done
on this technology by the Ugandan scientists or international
agencies, it shows how unwilling formal institutional system still is.
Therefore, challenge is not just to learn, but also to make layers of
institutions at different levels also to learn. Indian people can and
will learn as much if not more than what our African brothers and
sisters will learn. The development has to become a two way street.
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