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A Malian woman waters spring onions from an irrigation canal near Bewani.
A Malian woman waters spring onions from an irrigation canal near Bewani. Water conservation is a way of building resilience for farmers in the Sahel. Photograph: Nic Bothma/EPA
A Malian woman waters spring onions from an irrigation canal near Bewani. Water conservation is a way of building resilience for farmers in the Sahel. Photograph: Nic Bothma/EPA

The sceptical optimist helping poor people boost earnings – and resilience

This article is more than 8 years old

Innovation is making products affordable for communities previously shut out of the marketplace, says the head of the Global Resilience Partnership

Luca Alinovi describes himself as a sceptical optimist: he believes innovation can be a gamechanger in tackling the seemingly insurmountable challenges of global warming and entrenched extreme poverty, but he says that for the full benefits to be realised all those involved must find new ways of working together.

“Innovation is becoming a source of solutions that we never thought about. Today with the 3D printer you can print whatever you need. You don’t even need the factory. I wouldn’t be surprised if the 3D printer became an incredible development opportunity for people in the field,” he says.

“Technology is a problem-solver, and the acceleration it provides is giving us the chance to make the difference.”

Alinovi is the newly appointed executive director of the Global Resilience Partnership, a public-private initiative involving the Rockefeller Foundation, USAid and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. He says close cooperation – itself something of an innovation for parts of development – is critical.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his new job, Alinovi is upbeat about the private sector’s role in helping poor people earn more money – the only sure-fire way to cope better with shocks, including climate-related disasters, he says.

‘It has become possible for the social objective of a company to be its business objective,’ says Luca Alinovi. Photograph: Alessia Pierdomenico/FAO

The former head of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation in Somalia stresses that this also makes good business sense.

“In the last couple of years, it has become possible for the social objective of a company to be its business objective. It’s an incredible gamechanger because if you can make money helping people who have been been excluded from the economic environment become part of that environment, it’s the best way possible to make money,” he says.

Alinovi sees a sweet spot where innovation and private-sector engagement intersect.

“Most innovation is bringing about a dramatic decrease in costs of products and services so these are becoming affordable for communities of people who were not even considered potential clients,” he says.

However, there are still barriers to the optimal use of innovation, and that is why Alinovi would like to see a “coalition of goodwill”, including businesses, NGOs, the UN, civil society and innovators, to exploit this new development space.

“We need to do more to align our efforts because the space is there and a lot of investment is already going in this direction,” he says, noting that without much broader cooperation the impact of initiatives could be lost.

Encouraging people to work together is at the heart of the global resilience challenge, which is run by the partnership, and has awarded up to $1m (£683,000) each to eight projects to build resilience in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel and south-east Asia.

The brief for the competition is laden with development mots du jour: resilience; collaboration; innovation; multi-sectoral; high impact.

In Mali’s capital, Bamako, Peter Gubbels is ready to get to work turning these paper principles into practical action, but he is frustrated that the grant money from the challenge has not yet been released. The partnership says it is carrying out due diligence and the money should be paid soon.

Gubbels is a co-founder of Groundswell International, and his project involves helping small-scale farmers in the Sahel’s dry lands – across Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal – experiment with agroecological innovations to improve food production and give them a better variety of food to eat. At heart is the idea that farmers will share information and techniques with each other, while local governments will get involved and eventually shape national policies.

“A lot of what we are doing is innovative … We know the direction we want to go but we need to identify best practice, bring in outside partners and … our partners need to change to improve and develop new capacities,” Gubbels says.

His form of innovation could be seen as anti-innovation, a deliberate turning away from the green revolution agriculture that, he says, does not serve small farmers.

“We need forms of agriculture that are much more adaptable to diversify agriculture and minimise risk; use local resources, use agroforestry, use water conservation,” he says, noting that the processes of industrial agriculture – such as clearing land and rainforests and producing nitrogen fertilisers – also emit greenhouse gases.

“A more diversified agriculture that really can maximise profits and improve nutrition can have a major impact on resilience as well. Most development projects treat all the farmers and households the same … We need to differentiate between different categories of households and offer specialised packages of support.”

On the other side of Africa, teams from Meta Meta Research – another winner in the challenge – are working with governments in Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya, water and climate experts, and roadside communities to plan and build roads, improve harvesting of rainwater, and prevent soil erosion.

“We don’t use water from the surface of the road, but the road puts a sort of footprint on the land so it acts either as an embankment or it guides the water … so you are trying to manage the whole water in the landscape,” says Frank van Steenbergen of Meta Meta.

“This is a triple win. You create more resilience because you can make positive use of that water … If you manage the water properly around the road, you have less damage, and your road lasts longer,” he says.

Zurich Insurance is working with the partnership – investing $10m over a three-year period – to help communities deal with floods. For Alinovi, this is another example of how the private sector can be productively involved.

“Technology today allows us to zoom in and zoom out very easily. We can have a global and local perspective at the same time but we need to have a much more cohesive web of people talking to each other.”

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