Reinventing the wheel

The most important challenge with international development is to get the right resources at places where people need them most and to ensure that the model is sustainable. Lack of comprehensive knowledge about ground realities could lead to failure of the model.

Ideas need to come from decentralized sources to get maximum advantage[1]. Instead of having a few intelligent people in a room develop a product and sell to people, modern civilization has reached a stage where it has become mandatory for entrepreneurs to reach out to the target audience to understand the problem statement and come up with effective solutions. The bottom-line is that people will not buy anything that is not useful to them. Design thinking recognizes a need for this bottom-up approach.

A wonderful application of this approach is the concept of Wello water wheel:

[A woman using the Wello WaterWheel. Source: Wello]

Water, transportation and hygiene are constant challenges in northwestern belt of Rural India. Women often own the burden of having to walk up to five miles every day to fetch water.  United Nations has estimated that women in rural India spend about 25 percent of their time each day collecting water[2]. Cynthia Koenig, a social innovator and her team proposed a new way to make this task less difficult and improve the lives of people. They designed a rolling 50-litre cylindrical barrel to roll water from water sources rather than having women carry 10-20 litre containers over the head. This improved the efficiency by 400% whereby one person can now do the work of four people in less than half the time.

[Representation of efficiency of the system. Source: Wello]

Cynthia and her team did not propose this system in a single day. All they wanted is to reduce the water crisis and improve lives of women in Rural India. They used the idea of design thinking to lay out this success story.

The project was the result of a three-step process[3] [4]:

1. Inspiration:

They came out with a clear problem statement after interacting with local women. This step was to understand the problem statement and not come up with solutions.

2. Ideation:

"The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas" - Linus Pauling

They brainstormed many ideas and eliminated not-so-good ideas to come up with a design that is convenient, hygienic and durable. They created a basic design that could give rise to continuous innovations like utilizing the barrel for energy generation, advertising and so on.

3. Implementation:

They introduced a prototype and gave to sample public to use. They refined the model on receiving continuous feedback from the end-users to ensure that the model is foolproof.

Now that we have seen the benefits of the bottom-up approach, I have a few questions - 

Is a bottom-up approach always a viable option?  What could be the cases where a top-down approach in social entrepreneurship has an upper edge over the bottom -up approach?

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Fortune-Bottom-Pyramid-Eradicating/dp/0131467506

[2] http://www.unwater.org/worldwaterday/learn/en/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABJ41yVClvs

[4] http://wellowater.org/