Earth Homes for Flood Ravaged Pakistan

The devastating floods in July last year caused country wide wreckage of precious farmlands. Millions of people were rendered homeless with no food and shelter. The rehabilitation process has been quite slow from then onwards. The floods damaged nearly two million homes. According to World Bank estimates the floods have caused $10 billion dollars worth of damage to the infrastructure of the country. Although the government is helping flood victims rebuild their homes, there still thousands of people who have lost everything and cannot afford to rebuild their homes and are still living in flood relief camps. The government lacks funds to bridge the gap between demand and supply of low cost housing.The need of the hour is cheap and sustainable housing for the flood victims.

Earth Homes is a project inititated by John Spiers of the International Centre for Sustainable Development. Its an innovative building system that is built from compressed earth bricks and has features such as passive solar heating, rain water collection and distribution system and solar power. Spiers has partnered with Baber Ali Foundation, a Lahore based charitable organization to set up a social enterprise that will build zero energy affordable housing.

"The enterprise is designed to make a profit so it can continue without outside donations; the company will build the houses and use the profits to build more houses for other needy families." (Gazette) Five model homes would be created initially with the help of local workers to teach them the techniques used in the building process. These homes will be constructed in Syedwala, a town 70 miles southwest of Lahore in Pakistan's Punjab province. The village is expected to be made a centre of learning and innovation and would be used as a model for country wide setup.

"Earth Homes use solar energy to meet the electrical needs of the homeowner and include solar ovens that can be used to cook meals or bake on sunny days. The composting toilets use little water and turn bathroom and kitchen waste into compost for outside gardens, which in turn provide the homeowner with food. The systems are designed to withstand storms and continue operating even if surrounding third-party infrastructure breaks down.The houses will have one or two bedrooms and range in size from 600 to 800 square feet. A basic model would likely cost between $5000 and $10,000." (Gazette)

The completion date for five model homes is June 30 , 2011.

Some of the questions that come to mind are:

• Can the cost of these Earth Homes be further reduced?

• The costs are still too high for people who have lost everything in floods. Would the

  government provide the requisite subsidy for building these homes on a wide scale?

• Is the construction period required for these homes suitable enough to match the government targets of providing low cost housing in a short period of time?

Links

• http://www.gazette.net/stories/03162011/gaitnew191456_32533.php
• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8196341/Pakistan-floods-No-food-no-homes-no-help.html
• http://www.solarcities.org/pakistanproject.html

Research & Application on "How Illiterate People Learn"

Three most basic survival needs: water, food, and shelter, which most of us take for granted, are a daily struggle for 1.1 billion people around the world (those who live on less than $1/day estimated in 2001 by the World Bank); 17,000 children die of hunger every day (same source). What can we do about it? Examples of efforts trying to address this issue include the "food banks" concept and other charity activities. Although they provide relief to the basic-needs crises, the relief tends to be temporary, and its reach has been limited.

"Give a man a fish; you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish; you feed him for a lifetime." If we read this old adage in the context of poverty, we can relate to the role of "education" in pulling people out of poverty. But the word "education" is broad and disguises its complexity. The policy goal here is how to teach an illerate person to earn a decent living. To do that we need to understand how an illiterate person learns.

I came across an interesting research article, by Fanta-Vagenshtein (PhD) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, on "How Illiterate People Learn". What's interesting about this article is that we need to understand how adult illiterate people learn, we can then design effective educational policy and/or institutions to teach them "how to fish". Even if we manage to do just that, the challenge remains where to "fish", and whether or not there is enough "fish" for everybody. That is why vocational programs alone appear to be ineffective, unless there is a direct and reliable connection between training and jobs.

Lets also contribute our bit to the world...

The theme of the readings was to do more with less. How can we use innovation (or “frugal innovation”) to serve and facilitate the poor. This innovation can be in the basic necessities of life, from housing, electricity to technological solutions which can increase capacity and open new boundaries for the poor. On such innovative idea was proposed by the researchers at the Computer Science Department of Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). It was a research funded by the Microsoft Research (MSR) Digital Inclusion Grant.

This concept, which was aptly called “Poor Man’s Broadband”, is about using technology to provide high speed internet to the poor. Internet access in remote underdeveloped areas has increased at an exponential rate. While this access has opened them to a whole new world, the problem of slow-speed dial-up connectivity and data transfer remains an irritation issue. The “Poor Man’s Broadband” idea aims to solve this problem by using peer-to-peer Dial-up networking. This is quite the same way the Bit torrent works. This research proposes some innovations in the Bit torrent system to adapt it in solve this connectivity problems for the poor. For further reading I am attaching the paper link (see below) with this posting.

After seeing this and other technological social innovations such as increase access to mobile, One-Laptop-Per-Child and others the following questions comes to my mind:

1. The extend of possibilities that simple innovations like these can open up for the poor?

2. How can we through a simple idea, such as using Bit torrent or shared access telephony, change lives of millions?

3. When will we put on the innovation cap and contribute our bit to the world?

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Publication/4362403/poor-man-s-broadband-peer-to-peer-dialup-networking

Can we innovate for happiness? Should we?

Transparency is one of the most attractive characteristics in an interlocutor. So here's where I come from at the start of my social innovation journey: Put simply, government human service delivery to its most needy citizens (those living with chronic and severe disability, mental illness and brain injury) in developed country settings actually serves to scaffold dependence rather than foster independence. As the largest player in the human service space, governments the world over get to structure the conversations about how this particular part of the world works. The trouble is, scaffolding dependence only begets more dependence.

In case the URL I have attached to this post doesn't work, I'd love it if you could google Geoff Mulgan (from the Young Foundation in the UK) and watch his TEDx talk of the 25th March 2011, and tell me if you think what he says is as important as I believe. He talks alot about happiness and reslience (hence the title of this post). Actually, he (and I) think that governments should scaffold resilience rather than dependence.

Here's the rub: someone who is happy and feels a strong sense of agency over their own affairs tends to make fewer demands of those who support them than if they are unhappy and feel a lack of control. In my experience, this can be true even if someone lives with comorbid disability and mental illness with a tendency to the sort of crises that require stabilisation in hospital intensive care units.

I believe that the conversations that occur in the human service space should be as much about restoring and bolstering social capital as they should be about subsistence support with daily living.

I want to explore how social innovation enablers can permit this more authentic voice in the discource to emerge. I am excited about the possibility of mobile telephony in this space. Can this be a vehicle for social inclusion? I note the power transfer from state to individual that occurs in phenomena such as Nigerian citizens monitoring elections from mobiles, and I wonder: can we tap into the resilience of people with disabilities via their mobiles to effect similar power transfers? And if we can, how do we get governments to listen?