urdt lessons 2009

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Developing Change Agents to Spawn Grass Roots Innovation and Transformation in Africa Lessons Learned from Rural Africa Could Apply to Your Organization!

By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group April 9, 2009

NETTING IT OUT The Uganda Rural Development and Training Programme (URDT) has become a hotbed of innovative practices in integrated rural devel-opment. In this report, we focus on the innova-tions that URDT has created and the unique innovation transfer process that they are cur-rently piloting through the training and deploy-ment of committed young women as change agents in rural communities.

Many other development efforts have failed to create long-lasting results because too often any progress made by an individual is cut short by the weakest link in that person’s life. For ex-ample, a child might successfully enroll in school, but then die of malaria. Or a woman might learn how to start a small business, but then be prevented by her husband from doing so.

URDT provides an integrated approach based on the concept that to achieve lasting develop-ment, people must become empowered in all areas of their lives, including education, health, economic self-reliance, human rights, and civic participation. Since its inception, URDT has helped thousands of people improve their lives and has received accolades from international organizations for its innovative approaches.

URDT’s training of local people, especially women, to become leaders and creators, is changing the way rural communities work. Might similar practices work to spark customer-led innovation among your stakeholders?

Take-Aways for Fostering Innovation and Replicating the Innovation Process

Here are the take-aways from URDT’s proven approach to grass roots innovation which has been successful in rural Uganda for over 20 years:

Build a Culture of Customer-Led Innovation

• Promote a creative orientation (within and outside your organization).

• Instill multi-disciplinary, holistic systems thinking as a cultural norm

• Engage community members and stake-holders in co-design

How to Replicate Your Innovation Engine

• Attract and train visionary change agents.

• Ground them in creative orientation, vision-ary leadership, customer co-design, cross-disciplinary systems thinking, and practical skills.

• Send them out to seed and nurture innova-tion by working with customers in the field; Let them learn by doing, failing, and learn-ing from their mistakes. Provide coaching and celebrate successes.

• Network your change agents together and to the “mother ship” to share learnings and innovations from the field.

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The Uganda Rural Development and Training (URDT) Programme Does Not Rescue People It Empowers Them to Create Better Lives

From Poverty

Photo: URDT

To Prosperity

Photo: Nick Korn

URDT’s innovations in rural development have improved the lives of thousands of rural Ugandans in nine coun-ties. The house on the left is the typical rural house. On the right, African Rural University students are talking with a villager whose diversified farming has enabled him to begin construction on a new, brick home. The URDT approach ignites the creative drive within the people it touches.

HOW DO YOU DEVELOP A SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER-LED INNOVATION PRACTICE?

How do you build a successful, repeatable cus-tomer-led innovation practice and culture? We tend to look for innovation best practices and examples from corporate R&D labs, vibrant online customer communities, innovation consultancies, innovation exchanges and competitions. But there are many other places where innovation thrives. Uganda Rural Development and Training Programme (URDT) in Kagadi, Uganda is one.

URDT: Celebrates Twenty-Two Years of Successful Grass Roots Innovation

Founded in 1987, URDT grew out of the evolv-ing needs of the members of Kagadi, a small rural community in the Kibaale District in western Uganda. The three original founders—Mwalimu Musheshe, Ephrem Rutaboba, and Silvana Franco—came to the district looking for a community whose

leaders would be interested in piloting a new form of grass roots community development. The founders believed that getting aid from outside experts was the wrong way for villagers in rural Africa to do de-velopment work. Instead, they wanted the local peo-ple to create their own home-grown path to prosperity.

The three founders began by facilitating a com-munity action planning session under a mango tree in the small village. The villagers created a list of priorities (clean water, sanitation, more prosperous farms, education and jobs for their children, health-care, better roads, electricity, etc.) Then they began mobilizing to develop the know-how and to build the capacity to change their circumstances.

Now, 22 years later, the town has 30 businesses, a 100-bed hospital, prosperous farms, and a positive “can do” energy. Electricity has now reached Kagadi town. The roads are improving. (The journey from Kampala used to take two days by car; now it takes five hours.) The town and the surrounding region

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Developing Change Agents to Spawn Grass Roots Innovation and Transformation in Africa • 3

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have become more prosperous. Infant mortality has decreased dramatically, as has domestic violence and corruption.

URDT’s original three-person team has grown to a dedicated staff (now about 130 people) on an 80-acre campus that was deeded to them by a grateful local county. The campus is a beehive of activity with three schools, a demonstration farm, a commu-nity radio station, a computer and Internet center, social and land rights counseling, a solar technology center, and many other trades being learned and ap-plied. There are typically about 500 people on cam-pus at any time. The students and staff work with community leaders, local farmers, businesspeople, educators, churches, police, courts, and local non-government organizations (NGOs) to develop and deliver education, training, practical know-how, and

access to resources to help local people take the nec-essary actions to improve their lives. URDT has evolved its programs organically over the years, to serve a region that now includes 6 million people in 9 districts.

For 22 years, this grass roots organization has been innovating in the field of integrated rural de-velopment. Although not as well known as the Barefoot College1 in India or Grameen Bank2, the birthplace of micro-credit in Sri Lanka, URDT is a hotbed of innovative, yet pragmatic practices for sustainable rural development.

The Inception of URDT: How Do We Create Lasting Change?

In 1987, URDT founders looked at rural development and asked: “What is wrong with this picture? No change is happening.”


http://www.barefootcollege.org/

http://www.grameen-info.org/

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ESTABLISHING THE FRAMEWORK FOR INNOVATION

What’s the approach that URDT uses to inno-vate? It’s a customer co-design approach in which the multi-disciplinary staff work directly with their “customers”—the residents of the Kibaale district (and surrounding districts) and the students of all ages who flock to the URDT campus. The goal for every encounter is to spark the creative spirit in each person and to unleash their imagination. URDT’s motto: “Awakening the Sleeping Genius in Each of Us.”

Promote a Creative Orientation URDT’s repeatable innovation process is based

on the following proven approach which the three founders adapted from Robert Fritz’s Creative Proc-ess3:

• Encourage people to develop a vision for the life they want to have

• Ask them to objectively describe the current re-ality of their present circumstances

• Ask them to notice and to cherish the structural tension between their vision and their current re-ality

• Encourage them to commit themselves to achieve their visions.

• Help them brainstorm ways to achieve their vi-sions

• Support them in taking the steps required to at-tain their visions

• Help them adjust, fail, and experiment but still maintain the vision and the structural tension

Envision the Outcomes You Want to Create

URDT promotes a Creative Orientation. A local woman is describ-ing how she creates a picture in her head of the vision she wants to achieve. From the beginning, URDT has conversed with people about their own capabilities to cre-ate what they truly want. These are images from the Village Course scroll they carried around 20 years ago and used under the trees to discuss princi-ples for using choice, imagination, and mental focus to make progress.

You can see the local language written under the English. Most of the villagers they worked with in the beginning were illiterate, so the pictures were most important. Conversations were always held in the local language, since people who have not gone to school do not speak English, which is the national language and is taught in school.

This is another frame from the original scroll of the Vil-lage Course, that teaches principles of the creative process. Images, local lan-guage, and English (Uganda’s official language) convey the point.




Kagadi Villagers: What Do You Want to Create?

Kagadi Villagers’ Vision

Kagadi District, 1987 Current Reality


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Instill Multi-Disciplinary, Holistic Systems Thinking as a Cultural Norm

In addition to promoting a creative orientation, the second ingredient in URDT’s “secret sauce” is systems thinking.4 This approach came naturally to URDT’s three founders, but they also validated their own experience and instincts by studying with Peter Senge at MIT. URDT’s method includes the following principles:

• Take a holistic view of every issue

• Use systems thinking to spot interdependencies and unintended consequences

Engage Community Members and Stakeholders in Co-Design

URDT practices participatory, customer co-design, which includes two important dimensions: 1) the customers/citizens/stakeholders design their own solutions and therefore embrace and adopt them. 2) By including people with very different expertise and perspectives, you gain the advantage of cross-disciplinary, cross-gender, and cross-age points of view in the design and implementation of any solu-tion. URDT’s approach to innovation includes these additional principles:

• Leverage local knowledge and expertise • Engage participants of all ages and genders • Employ cross-disciplinary teams

What are the kinds of innovations that URDT’s local staff, local residents and partners have created? Let’s take a look.

URDT’S INNOVATIONS

Innovative Approaches to Integrated Rural Development

Although many development organizations preach integrated development, there are few suc-cessful models in the practice of grass roots (bot-toms up/citizen-led rather than top down/expert-led) integrated rural development. Here are some of the

innovative approaches that URDT, its clients, and stakeholders have developed that are successful. Each of these initiatives is innovative; together they form a powerful integrated approach to rural com-munity development:

COMMUNITY RADIO. The use of community radio is the communications mechanism for outreach, edu-cation, and citizen involvement. By the mid-90s, the community members in Kagadi had accomplished many infrastructure projects (water, sanitation, nutri-tion), but they were concerned about the violence and corruption that plagued the region. They wanted more of a voice in local affairs. But they said, “in order to participate, we need information!” When asked, “what’s the best way to get information to everyone?” they all agreed it would be via radio. You don’t have to be literate to pick up important information on the radio. Battery-powered radios are relatively inexpensive.

So, URDT launched its KKCR community radio station in 2000. It was the first FM Community Ra-dio station in East Africa. KKCR broadcasts 18 hours per day in seven local languages and English. The radio reaches 10 districts in Western Uganda. It has an avid listenership of over two million people. The radio programming is developed and produced by the staff, students, and community members. Community members co-design and present pro-grams on the radio.

There’s an open door policy. You can walk in to talk on the radio or call in to talk on the radio. Many people use the radio to let their friends and family members know where they are and what they’re do-ing. Children have a voice on the radio—both the girls from the URDT Girls’ School—who develop and air dramas about domestic violence, local cor-ruption, children’s rights, to name a few topics—and the children from the local community, who wait patiently in line dressed in their best clothes on Sun-days for their turn on the air.

Outreach programming includes agricultural educa-tion for local farmers, HIV/AIDs education, pro-grams for and by local women, as well as visionary leadership training.




Community Radio

In 2000, URDT launched the first community radio station in East Africa. It provides information sharing, training, and education in the local language to over 4 million listeners. It is enormously popular. Every mud hut has its transistor radio. People travel on foot for miles to come speak on the radio. And now with cell phones, people call in on talk shows. Radio announcements help organize people for group projects like road and bridge building, for example. Every Sunday the children are free to speak, and a hundred line up to wait their turn to greet their grannies or recite their own poem.

A group of local women are preparing a radio show for broadcast.

On Children’s Day, the local kids take over the radio programming for the whole day!


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ANTI-CORRUPTION CITIZEN ACTIVISM. URDT fosters open dialogue and debate on the radio among local politicians, tribal leaders, and citizens about corruption, violence, and infrastructure priorities. Citizens call in to the radio to report corruption and crime. Politicians defend themselves on the radio. Due to citizen engagement on the radio around local government and policy issues, voter turnout in the districts served by the radio has increased from 40 to 85 percent!

GENDER EDUCATION. “Having a strong woman at your side,” “making decisions as a family,” “educat-ing girls to increase the value of their contributions to the community,” are all val-ues that are integrated into all of URDT’s programs, from voca-tional skills training, to farm extension services, to manage-ment training, to radio pro-gramming.

For example, when my husband, Tom Hagan, interviewed local entrepreneurs about what they learned at the URDT vocational institute that helped them start their businesses and become successful, he was expecting them to talk about the trade skills they learned, the tools they were pro-vided, or the management training they received, but they all cited something else: Gender Studies!

All of URDT’s courses include a grounding in the understanding of the ways that men and women communicate differently, what they value, and how they can work together productively, both in the household and in business. In fact, the Institute’s vocational courses pair up young men and women to learn and practice welding, carpentry, food process-ing, and other trades.

SOCIAL RIGHTS AND LAND RIGHTS ADJUDICATION. The URDT campus has become a magnet for family members seeking redress from grievances and for dealing with land disputes. The on-campus counseling services provide arbitration and issues resolution. The settlements agreed to by

the families are quickly rubber-stamped by the local authorities, because they are fair and they stick. This saves time in the local court system and yields more consistent settlements, than those that are typically arrived at in the local justice system.

The radio is used to educate people about their rights and to adjudicate issues on the air. One of the most popular radio shows is Odembos Maloba’s call-in show. Odembos is the human rights officer at URDT. He uses the radio to give voice to people who have suffered from domestic or institutional abuse. Odembos uses his weekly radio program to expose a particularly egregious example of child neglect, do-

mestic violence, or human rights abuses. He asks the aggrieved party to tell their story on the air. They describe how they were treated by local police or officials, how many different avenues they had to use to get redress, and who stood in their way. He gives these victims a voice and they educate others so that they will know what to do in a similar situation and won’t suffer the same obsta-cles. He takes calls and sugges-tions from avid listeners, and he

arbitrates publicly, illustrating the principles of jus-tice, fairness, and explaining the Ugandan penal code and the constitution. This way people know what their rights are, so the local officials can’t abuse their power.

HIV/AIDS EDUCATION. URDT developed an inno-vative outreach program for HIV/AIDS education. They noticed that frank and free discussion of the issues related to HIV/AIDS and risky sexual behav-ior is often blocked by deeply held views that men have about women and sex and that women have about men and sex. Dialogue and shared learning stop when men are blaming women and women blaming men about such issues as who is or is not using condoms and whose behavior is causing the spread of HIV. So URDT worked with village lead-ers to develop a program for “Village Reflection and Dialogue on Gender and HIV/AIDS.”

Due to citizen engagement on the radio around local

government and policy issues, voter turnout in the districts

served by the radio has increased from 40 to

85 percent!




Men and Women Learn Vocational Trades Together

The URDT Institute for Vocational Studies trains young men and women in carpentry, metal work, brick making, food processing and entrepreneurship. In a recent survey of graduates of this Institute who are now running their own businesses and employing others, the one thing every man said they especially remembered learning at the Institute was to treat women more equally. In all URDT’s programs there is a component on gender equality and human rights.

Human Rights and Land Rights Counseling

People come to the URDT campus from miles around to get counseling, arbitration and adjudication when they feel their rights have been violated. Women come to complain about domestic violence. Families come to seek redress when land rights are disputed. People come seeking help in dealing with officials and to understand the laws. Children also come to complain if they are not being treated well at home.

Statistics show that poverty indicators, like disease, infant mortality, and maternal morbidity, drop dramatically as girls are educated. HIV/AIDS education needs to start with children.


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The HIV/AIDS Dialogue program is delivered in local languages. It includes drama, dialog, education, facilitation, and is supported by radio programming. Over 2,000 field guides were used and 19 commu-nity-based organizations in 19 sub-counties have taken part in the program with dramatic results. The local hospitals have had to increase their HIV testing programs because the number of people who have asked to be tested for HIV/AIDS increases dramati-cally, each time these awareness courses are run both in villages and on the radio.

HELPING FARMERS WITH HIV. Working together with local farmers who have contracted HIV, URDT developed a support program for farmers to success-fully live and work with HIV and remain productive. This program is promulgated via Community Radio. One of the infected farmers who was close to death 10 years ago, now hosts a regular radio program about living productively with HIV. He has destig-matized the disease for farmers and their families.

PREVENTING HIV/AIDS IN CHILDREN. The most recent innovative program in HIV/AIDS education and outreach is currently being developed to reach sexually active children and teens. Many children who live with their parents in one-room huts begin mimicking their parents’ love-making at a very early age. Many children are born HIV-positive. That means that the virus can be spreading even before a child reaches puberty.

In talking with young girls who are helping in the design of the new training and education materials, Jacquelyn Akello, programme director at URDT re-ported, “these girls have no idea that they are risking their lives. They believe that if they don’t have a baby in their teens, they will never be able to have children, and they believe that if they stay in school, they will never attract a husband.”

Agricultural Innovations The URDT campus includes a demonstration

farm that is used to educate local farmers, the stu-dents at the Girls School, Institute students, and the University students. The URDT Farm practices sus-tainable agriculture, making use of the principles of organic farming, perma culture, including compost-ing, mulching, crop rotation, and organic fertilizers.

The farm operations include a wide variety of grains and vegetables, including coffee and tea, cows, pigs, and chickens, bee-keeping, agro forestry, woodlots management, and a maize mill. URDT’s agricultural innovations include:

INTRODUCED FISH FARMING. In visiting a re-gion to the south in the 1990s, the villagers in Ka-hunge listed “swamps” as part of their current reality. In discussions, they decided that those swamps could become a resource. Why not turn the swamps into ponds and raise fish? URDT developed fish food using a combination of chicken manure and leaves from Russian cornflake plants. The fish ponds are surrounded with mint to keep the snakes away. Women fish farmers now have over six fish ponds using the URDT model. These women have also organized their own preschool for their small chil-dren to allow themselves to do a more productive job as fish farmers.

RECYCLING WASTE INTO ENERGY. Animal ma-nure is converted to bio-gas and used to power cook-ing stoves.

INTENSIVE CASH CROP PRODUCTION. URDT and local farmers realized that for many families, the plots of land become smaller and smaller as lease-holdings are subdivided among the children in the family. So they have created a number of small-footprint farming methods, in which you can grow a cash crop on a very small plot of land. One such in-vention is a small footprint greenhouse that is made from sticks and plastic sheeting with tomatoes grown vertically on strings. It produces abundant harvests and pays off the investment quickly.

NEW ORGANIC CROPS FOR THE REGION. Local farmers were seeking new crops that that can be transported long distances over bad roads in order to be exported from this land-locked rural country. URDT’s agronomists worked with exporters of or-ganic produce to develop new crops and certified organic agricultural practices and to test them on local farms. Now sesame seed and chili beans are now being grown by 4,000 local farmers and sold for export through an organic export fair trade farm-ers' cooperative.




After working with people in their own villages for 10 years, URDT acquired 80 acres of land for a campus. The first priority was to establish a demonstration organic farm so that people could learn more quickly and see good agricultural practices in operation. The farm is still used for training, as well as for income generation and for feeding the staff and students on the campus.

URDT trained subsistence farmers to produce cash crops using the demonstration farm on the URDT campus and extension programs. They taught farmers to move from mono-culture to planting complementary plants.

This Tomato Greenhouse can be built and stocked for a few hundred dollars. Plants grow vertically, and produce dramatic yields. These plants are being tended by the Girls’ School students.


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AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION SERVICE VIA COMMUNITY RADIO. A local woman farmer re-ported, “from the ‘Wake up and Work’ radio pro-gram, we learned that people even with very small capital could start selling greens in the market. How has this improved our life? Well, for one, we never lack salt, sugar, and paraffin for cooking, and we always have soap. This was not the case before! ‘And all of this simply because of the new informa-tion!’”

Education Innovations There are three formal educational institutions on

the campus—the Girls’ School, the Vocational and Business Institute, and the African Rural University for Women. They all share the same campus re-sources and work together on projects. For example, the girls learn to make chairs which they take home at the end of the term. The car-pentry students make beds for the Girls boarding school. All of the courses share the same foun-dation in the creative process, visionary leadership, and gender equality. In addition, all of the staff and adult students on the campus meet for a one-hour seminar on systems thinking each morning—honing their analysis skills by examining local issues that are arising in the region.

GIRLS’ SCHOOL’S CO-CURRICULUM. This unique approach links education to rural develop-ment. The URDT Girls' School educates girls 12 to 18 in both Ugandan national curriculum AND prac-tical “how to’s” for rural life. The school provides formal education (Uganda’s National Education Board curriculum) as well as informal training through co-curricular activities that enhance their skills in leadership, commercial-oriented sustainable agricultural, entrepreneurship, appropriate technolo-gies (solar, computer, internet), media outreach, as well as crafts (furniture, baskets, clothing) for sales and home use. Girls' write, produce and present plays and musicals to train villagers on issues such as political corruption, domestic violence, HIV

AIDS treatment and prevention, land rights, and human rights. They present these plays in villages and on the radio.

The Ugandan Ministry of Education is now inter-ested in this curriculum for broader adoption in other rural districts. They have asked URDT to train 1,000 teachers this year, to turn them from teachers into facilitators of integrated learning.

GIRLS’ SCHOOL’S TWO-GENERATION EDUCATION. The URDT Girls’ school uses a unique two-generation approach to education. It re-quires girls' families to participate in their daughters' education through functional adult literacy training and encourages them to study the same curriculum their daughters are learning.

GIRLS’ SCHOOL’S BACK HOME PROJECTS. As part of the two-Generation Edu-cation and the girls’ visionary leadership training, the girls and their families are graded on "Back Home" projects—after being guided in visioning by their daughters, each family picks a project to accomplish during the school term (while their daughter is away at school): build a new house, build a latrine,

raise a new crop or livestock, improve home or vil-lage sanitation, make their farm more productive (drying racks, crop rotation, complimentary multi-crop planting ). Their daughters provide the exper-tise and guidance to their families and communities during their vacation breaks. In fact, Monica, a 14-year old reported proudly that there was usually a line of local people turning up at her door during each school vacation—people who were looking for advice about how to improve their homes and farms.

As a result, of the two-generation education and their back home projects, girls' families' incomes typically increase by 20 percent during the 4 years that they send their daughters away to school. It’s a good trade-off since these girls are usually the “workers” in the family, hauling water, tending crops, gathering food, cooking food, babysitting.

Girls' families' incomes typically increase by

20 percent during the 4 years that they send their daughters

away to school.




The URDT Girls’ School

The Girls’ School is a boarding school for 240 girls from poor rural families (12 to 18 years old). They learn the Uganda curriculum + visionary leadership, gender equality, health & nutrition, organic farming, journalism, solar energy, computers & appropriate technology.

Two-Generation Education

A student teaches parents and relatives how to decide what outcome they want to achieve and how to make it happen!

Girls’ School Students Learn to Make Furniture for Their Homes

Parents admire the furniture their daughters have made for their homes.


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Back Home Projects: Monica’s New House!

At the age of 14, Monica helped her family grow more crops to produce enough income so that they could design and build a new home (left). The older home is still used as the kitchen.

Back Home Projects: Family’s New Piggery

Another girl’s family began a piggery, and extended their gardens greatly.

Back Home Projects: Under Construction

The URDT staff and guests visits this family’s Back Home Project to take stock. Improvements include a drying rack for dishes, and a new garden crop, and an extension to the house.




TESTING THE GIRLS’ SCHOOL MODEL IN DAY SCHOOLS. The results from the Girls’ School have been dramatic, but now parents are asking whether they couldn’t have the same kind of education for girls (and boys) who are not in a boarding school setting. URDT has launched two day schools—one for primary education and one for secondary educa-tion, to see whether the co-curriculum, the two-generation education and the Back Home projects will work as well for students who go home every night.

INSTITUTE’S RURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP CURRICULUM. The Institute is designed to provide young men and women the vocational and manage-ment training required to run their own non-farm businesses. The innovative approach that URDT takes is that no matter what career the student is pre-paring for, or supplementing with new skills, they also receive training in visionary leadership, gender studies, in the use and maintenance of rural tech-nologies, business management, and other aspects of entrepreneurship. In fact, one of the hallmarks of the vocational training programs at the Institute is the fact that young men and women are put together in teams to learn their trades, so that men and women are learning by doing side by side—this is unique in this part of Africa.

The Institute provides training in accounting, mar-keting, and business administration, as well as car-pentry, metal working, auto mechanics, solar energy, welding, tailoring, food processing, and journalism. They also provide business training support for local artisans, water technicians, health workers, and tra-ditional birth attendants. They provide and refurbish tools, and provide loans for small businesses.

THE AFRICAN RURAL UNIVERSITY FOR WOMEN (ARU) TRAINS COMMUNITY CHANGE AGENTS. This is the only university program that prepares women to be community transformation leaders and entrepreneurs in rural African communi-ties. The curriculum is derived from URDT’s 22-years of learning about what works in integrated ru-

ral development from its own experience. The stu-dents learn by doing, both on campus and in the field. This is a three-year degree program, which is now concluding its pilot phase. The curriculum has been co-designed and debugged by the first cohort of 30 students, who are now completing their third-year in the program.

APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGIES' INNOVATIONS

URDT considers “appropriate technologies” to be those that are appropriate for rural use and adop-tion. Some of these are older techniques that Afri-cans used to use but which had been forgotten. Once the need is identified, URDT looks first to village elders for local knowledge which might be com-bined with modern techniques and available materi-als. Among the technologies that URDT has invented, applied and adapted for rural use are:

COMMUNITY-LED BORE HOLE AND WATER SOURCE PROTECTION. In Uganda, as in many other parts of Africa, the drilling of wells and the installation of pumps to pump sanitary drinking wa-ter is typically performed by water treatment experts, who are paid by the county government or by an NGO. The problem with this approach is that the villagers do not consider the resulting spring to be “theirs,” so they do not maintain it; nor do they nec-essarily have the know-how to do so. URDT’s first innovation was to show local men and women how to protect their bore holes and to keep them in sani-tary condition. Over 20 years later, the community-maintained water sources are still in operation, while the county-provided bore holes typically last only four to five years.

HUMAN-POWERED IRRIGATION SYSTEMS. Farmers, working together with URDT, have devel-oped a set of irrigation methods to bring water from a fish pond, stream, or other reliable source of water for crops, using gravity, pulleys, and local materials. By cranking a wheel, and activating a series of pul-leys, the farmer can irrigate his fields.


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The URDT Institute for Vocational, Business and Media Studies

The URDT Institute for Business, Vocational and Media Studies, trains 175 local young men and women per year to be entrepreneurs with a combination of skills and management education.

Institute Grads Are Job-Creators; Not Job-Seekers

Mukuru Moses, URDT Institute graduate and proud owner of Kagadi Metal Works, where he has trained 8 apprentices.

Another Institute graduate makes high quality furniture for a living.

• 56 community-based technicians creating and maintaining various technologies in commu-nities

• 460 households access solar electricity and its various benefits

• 1 graduate launched a string of nursery schools

• 6 Women grads launched a Micro-Finance institution

The Institute Has Spawned Local Entrepreneurship

• 30 New Businesses in Kagadi town, including: o Brick-making o Furniture company o Clothing company o Bakery o Restaurant o Hotels

• 10 New Training Cooperatives in craft, carpentry, metal work and mechanics around Kagadi sub-county

• New Farmers’ Cooperative has built a road to Kagadi, warehouse and office




Appropriate Technologies

One of the first things people identified that they wanted in their lives was clean water. Groups of people protected their own springs, which they have continued to maintain over 2 decades. Now over 34,000 people in the district have access to clean water through their own efforts.

Village Built and Maintained Bore Holes for Clean Water

A simple but ingenious system is used to pump water from the fish pond to the top of a platform. Simple gravity takes the water from there through a hose out to the fields that are at a higher level than the pond.

A Rope and Washer Pump for Micro-Irrigation


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This is a biogas plant on campus, using manure to run the kitchen stoves. Enoch Kyambadde, who is the head agronomist, demonstrates its operation.

BioGas Production on the URDT Campus

URDT trains solar technicians, and many homes in the district now use solar power to provide lights at night. The district had no electrical power until last year, and still most people have no access to it. This solar center is also used to charge batteries that villagers can use to power their homes and bring them back to be recharged from solar energy. In front of the building are charcoal coolers, and solar drying racks. Solar dryers preserve fruits and vegetables with no bacteria.

URDT’s Solar Technology Center

URDT has a computer lab, Internet access via Satellite dish and WIFI on campus.

The Computer Lab




BIOGAS PRODUCTION AND DEPLOYMENT. URDT pioneered the recycling of methane from ma-nure for homes and farms. They have developed a simple set up that any family can create out of lo-cally available materials to transform methane from compost into enough cooking gas to cook their meals.

CHARCOAL COOLERS. The use of charcoal to line wooden boxes to "refrigerate" perishable foods

DRYING RACKS. An easy and sanitary way to pre-serve foods and dry dishes; this is a practice that has been re-born and re-introduced into homes and vil-lages through URDT outreach.

SOLAR TECHNOLOGIES. A single solar panel will provide light for a household after dark. Many households can’t afford to install a solar panel, but they can afford to buy a battery and have it charged by a shared solar panel. But these panels need to be maintained and batteries charged and swapped out. URDT trains men and women to be solar technicians to install and maintain solar systems and to establish local battery charging facilities in the bush. Hun-dreds of households are now equipped with solar energy.

INTERNET CAFÉ, COMPUTER TRAINING, WIFI ACCESS. I was amazed to discover URDT’s appe-tite for computer technology years before electric power lines reached the campus. URDT was one of the first rural campuses to realize how empowering it is for people to be able to use the Internet in an untethered way. The campus installed a satellite dish to gain access to the Internet in 2000. At the time, electricity was provided by a combination of diesel generators and solar panels and batteries. WIFI was installed on campus in 2007, but its use had to be curtailed because the more people jumped on, the higher the monthly bills for Internet access. (Access to broadband costs at least $1,000/month in rural Uganda—in a region in which the typical income is $1/day).

MICROFINANCE & BUSINESS

There were no banks in the region and no source of financing for farmers.

WOMENS’ MICRO-FINANCE COOP. URDT spawned a locally-developed micro-finance banking system founded by three women graduates of URDT's Institute. The first women’s’ lending group quickly grew to 11 such groups totaling 365 women. They then formed a micro-lending co-op.

LOANS FOR GIRLS’ FAMILIES’ FARMS. URDT provides loans for parents of the girls attending the Girls' School. These loans help families' with their farms and are paid back from the productivity im-provements brought home by their 12- to 18-year old daughters!

CAMPUS ENTERPRISES. URDT has spawned a number of businesses on campus that produce reve-nue. These include: battery charging, automotive repair, brick-making, furniture, timber, crops from the farm, milling of maize, computer and internet access, an on-campus store, catering services, trans-portation, and radio advertising. These on campus businesses provide about 40% of the revenues for the organization, jobs and hands on business experi-ence for students.

LOCAL BUSINESSES PROVIDE SKILLS TRAINING. Graduates of the Vocational Institute have spawned dozens of local businesses, from bicy-cle repair to furniture manufacture, clothing and res-taurants—what's unique about these businesses is that they are 1) successful, 2) they train new workers, and 3) they are gender-conscious—women are viewed as equal participants by the graduates of the Institute. Each Institute graduate who starts a busi-ness typically trains four interns at a time and em-ploys three to four people. These graduates consider it their duty to provide others with training in the skills they have mastered.

NEED FOR EQUIPMENT LEASING OR BUSINESS LOANS. A need that has been identified, but not yet satisfied, is a way to provide capital loans or leases for rural businesses needing $5,000 to $50,000 to procure capital equipment (e.g., machine tools, manufacturing equipment). Local banks now provide farm loans and micro-loans, but there are no leasing programs or commercial loans available to small capital-intensive businesses in rural areas.


20 • Case Study


It began with a group of 6 women in 1995 and quickly grew to 11 groups of women—365; This prosperous women’s cooperative micro-finance institution now serves several thousand customers.

Women Institute Grads Created Their Own MicroFinance Arm in 1995

URDT’s Institute Students Build Furniture for the School

The URDT Farm Feeds the 650 People on Campus and Still Has Produce to Sell




HOW DO YOU REPLICATE SUCCESSFUL INNOVATION PRACTICES?

For over 20 years, the Uganda Rural Develop-ment and Training Programme (URDT) has been catalyzing and practicing customer-led, participatory grass roots innovation. URDT creates social and business entrepreneurs by 1) instilling in people the capacity to create and commit to a personal vision and 2) providing them with the know-how and the tools to mobilize themselves and others. URDT has been successful in engaging people in the local community to co-create new programs and practices. URDT catalyzes action in its radio listeners, spurring entrepreneurship. Innovation spreads in the villages in which the families of the girls’ in the Girls’ School live. Innovation and entrepreneurship are spread in the areas in which its graduates reside and work and/or where outreach or extension programs take place.

How else can the URDT model of grass roots in-novation be more broadly replicated?

Replicate Visionary Change Agents Mwalimu Musheshe is convinced that the best

way to replicate URDT’s systemic approach to grass roots innovation is not to clone more campuses in other parts of Uganda or Africa, as the Barefoot Col-lege has done, but to clone himself! He wants to educate “Musheshas,” as the ARU students call themselves.

Here’s the URDT replication model: Create vi-sionary leaders who are steeped in the experience gained from 20+ years of trial and error in customer-led grass roots rural development, and who are themselves successful visionary leaders and social and business entrepreneurs. Send them into the rural countryside from which they came to “awaken the sleeping geniuses” in their own villages.

The purpose of the African Rural University is to attract and educate women to be rural innovators, entrepreneurs and change agents in their own rural communities, for them to be embraced as commu-nity transformation leaders. The graduates of ARU are so well versed in the creative orientation and in

systems thinking, that it has become second nature to them. They are trained in all aspects of rural de-velopment, from sanitation and nutrition, to agricul-ture, to local trades and the use of appropriate technologies. They are well versed in the complex interplay of disease, family planning, cultural beliefs, gender issues, human rights, land rights, and conflict resolution. They know how to mobilize a commu-nity to develop its own community plan of action and to tackle big projects, without waiting for hand-outs or experts. They know how to inspire individu-als to dream beyond the day to day and they can show them how to tap the structural tension between their current reality and their vision to create mo-mentum.

Four Steps to Replicating an Engine of Innovation

The approach that URDT is taking to grow its in-novative capacity may be appropriate for other busi-nesses and not-for-profits. In many ways, it’s an approach that has been practiced by missionaries for centuries. The difference however, is that its purpose is not to promulgate religion, but to spawn innova-tion and entrepreneurship, and to co-create innova-tive solutions to local problems and issues by inspiring and energizing local people.

1. Attract and train visionary change agents.

2. Ground them in creative orientation, visionary leadership, customer co-design, cross-disciplinary systems thinking, and practical skills.

3. Send them out to seed and nurture innovation by working with customers in the field; Let them learn by doing, failing, and learning from their mistakes. Provide coaching and celebrate suc-cesses.

4. Network them together and to the “mother ship.”


22 • Case Study


The first class of ARU students.

The African Rural University for Women

These women work hard academically and also in the surrounding communities, learning how to be leaders in transformative change.

ARU Students on Campus




ATTRACT AND TRAIN VISIONARY CHANGE AGENTS. How do you attract the right kinds of peo-ple who will thrive and be successful as change agents and transformation leaders? What qualities are you seeking? How can you screen for them?

What URDT did was to promote the ARU pro-gram over its community radio, as well as to circu-late information through local newspapers and via other NGOs. This publicity attracted women from all regions who were interested in attaining a University degree but who might not be well-suited to become change agents. Applicants were carefully screened. The program was carefully explained. Its goal was not that of degree-granting, or of preparing students for work in a large business.

Candidates had to be able to raise enough funds to pay their school fees ($150 per year), which dem-onstrated their ability to mobilize resources. They had to be able to leave their families (many had hus-bands and children) for three years, which demon-strated their ability to generate support from their families to pursue their own visions. Candidates had to be clear that they would be working in their own home communities upon graduation and that they would be creating their own jobs and livelihoods, which demonstrated their entrepreneurial bent.

The result of the screening was largely successful. The candidates who actually enrolled in the three-year program were committed to returning home to their villages and to working in their own villages to improve their own economic situation and that of their community members. The first cohort of ARU students consisted of 32 students. Three years later, 29 of them had completed the arduous three-year program (one death, and two pregnancies accounted for the attrition).

GROUND THEM IN CREATIVE ORIENTATION, VISIONARY LEADERSHIP, CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN, CROSS-DISCIPLINARY SYSTEMS THINKING, AND PRACTICAL SKILLS. What kind of training do visionary change agents need? What URDT has found is that you can’t learn to be an in-novator or a leader by taking classes. You learn by doing.

Creative Orientation. The most important skill that these innovators need to internalize and to master is how to shift their own orientation or world view

from a reactive, problem-solving orientation to a creative, visionary orientation. This takes time. As with any skill, from becoming good at tennis to fly-ing a plane, you don’t master it overnight. But over a period of three years, it is possible to become mas-terful in approaching the world from a creative ori-entation. It becomes second nature to develop a vision of the end results you want to achieve and to objectively observe all the details of the current situation and context. You commit to achieving your desired results even though you have no idea exactly how to proceed. Then you let the natural creative process flood you with ideas and possibilities, you try out different options, get feedback, adjust, and continue to improvise your way to your goal.

Visionary Leadership. You become a leader by leading. You become a visionary leader by empow-ering others to create and articulate their own visions and to help them form a shared collective vision of the results they want to achieve. Each member of your team wants to reach their vision for themselves as well as for the group. When multiple stakeholders have overlapping goals with conflicting priorities, you create alignment by agreeing on a larger shared vision and outcome with clear parameters for suc-cess and conditions of satisfaction for all. Then, you learn to mobilize the group by keeping the structural tension between where they are and what they all want to achieve and by keeping them inspired and committed to their shared and individual visions. In the ARU program, the students take turns leading their own teams, leading teams of Girls’ School stu-dents and Institute students, as well as mobilizing stakeholders on campus to undertake innovative pro-jects. Then they are ready to begin working in the local community.

Customer Co-Design. ARU change agents want to empower and inspire others to create new ap-proaches, not to be the experts who tell people what to do. Therefore, every project begins with a cus-tomer co-design session. URDT calls this a Com-munity Action Planning Session—in which each group of stakeholders is led through a process of articulating their visions, describing the current real-ity, and brainstorming the ideas they have for taking action to achieve their visions.


24 • Case Study


Resty Namubiru, 2nd year ARU student, leading a community workshop in 2007. The villagers are beginning to talk about their visions and current realities together.

ARU Students in the Field

Villagers participating in their Community Action Planning Workshop in 2008.

Grace Nyangoma takes notes during her practicum in the field in the Spring of 2009.




Each group of stakeholders (e.g., men heads of households, women heads of households, teenagers, village elders, kids) presents their vision, their cur-rent reality, and their prioritized actions to the group as a whole. The group then prioritizes across all of the stakeholders’ plans to create a comprehensive set of quick wins and strategic projects they can all be-gin to work on. The facilitators’ role is to help the customers articulate their visions clearly and to help them think creatively, rather than reactively.

The ARU students discovered that one of the tools they used on campus—women’s circles—provided an innovative approach to sustaining de-velopment progress in their communities. They formed women’s circles to create a safe space for women to come together and share their hopes and fears. These women’s circles, while started by the students, persisted after they left the village. They are becoming part of the fabric of village life and decision-making. In a women's circle in one com-munity that the ARU students helped form and lead, one woman said, “There is no peace in my life. But in this circle, I find hope for peace.”

Cross-Disciplinary Systems Thinking. Mastering holistic systems thinking also takes time and practice. How do all of these different issues (beliefs, cultural norms, current practices, health, nutrition, gender, local resources) interact with one another? What are the causes and effects, what unintended conse-quences did we foresee or miss?

URDT provides daily training in systems think-ing through interactive one-hour seminars held at the beginning of each day in what is called the “Founda-tion Course.” Each morning, all of the adults on campus (200 or so) meet for an hour. Each morning someone raises a different issue, and the group con-siders the historical background and local context, identifies the forces at play and analyzes their sys-temic interplay. The participants in this daily semi-nar change over time as new people arrive on campus. They represent a range of specialties and disciplines as diverse as agriculture, engineering, life sciences, computers and communications technology, primary education, secondary education, social sci-ences, business, finance, marketing, gender studies,

public policy, government, land rights, social work, etc.

After three years of interactive participation in these daily seminars, ARU students become profi-cient in looking at most issues in a holistic cross-disciplinary manner.

Practical Skills. Each ARU student acquires a range of practical skills during her three-year tenure. Stu-dents study the indigenous crafts and know-how from different tribes and regions. They explore the physics of locally-designed irrigation systems. They study the chemical properties of herbal remedies. They discover the biology of different plants and their reactions to different types of fertilizers. They learn how to build latrines, make bricks, raise chick-ens and pigs, make furniture, and grow a business.

SEND THEM OUT TO SEED AND NURTURE INNOVATION BY WORKING WITH CUSTOMERS IN THE FIELD. The kind of entrepreneurship and innovation that ARU change agents learn to foster requires engagement with customers as co-designers and co-creators.

Starting in their first year of study, the students begin their field work doing community action plan-ning, co-designing new radio programs, creating new NGO programs by and with local community members, and working with local entrepreneurs to help them grow their businesses.

In the second year, they begin their own “back home” projects in their local communities, working with their families and their community members to create a new business venture or infrastructure pro-ject that will contribute to increasing the prosperity of their own families and communities. (The idea is to have built momentum and even a business that will become their livelihood by the time they gradu-ate.)

By the third year, ARU students engage in a one-month practicum, moving into a local community and working with the residents to plan and start a project for social or economic development. The first group of third-year students completed their Practicum projects in March, 2009. They worked in teams of two in each village.


26 • Case Study


ARU Change Agents in Training

Two third-year ARU students taking a break with their hostess during their 1-month practicum.

A group of villagers being led in a Community Action Planning workshop by two ARU students.




Although each team of girls had a host family who had agreed to put them up and to introduce them to the community, most of the rest of the community residents were skeptical and standoffish. Instead of plunging directly into their Community Action Planning, the students instinctively realized that they should simply live with the people and con-tribute in small ways. They began by cleaning up the inside and outside of the hut in which they were liv-ing. They hauled water, cleared brush, told stories to the children, and cooked meals. Then they began asking questions: Who maintains the local spring? Why do you think your children are sick? What could you feed them that would make them health-ier? They worked hard, asked questions, and planted ideas without giving advice. Within a couple of weeks, the villagers were ready to begin thinking and planning together. So they invited interested parties to participate in action planning sessions. Soon everyone arrived. Nobody wanted to be left out!

The projects the community members designed

and worked on included:

• Getting a local brick maker to train local youth (young men and women) in brick-making.

• Mobilizing a community to build a new road in order to make it easier and faster to get to mar-ket and to the nearest health facility.

• Showing families how to build their own wash-rooms—these are separate outdoor rooms used for sponge baths that are far enough away from the house that the run off doesn’t make the yard and house muddy.

• Inspiring villagers to build and use drying racks for their cassava plants, to preserve them longer and to keep them fresh and clean.

• Mobilizing villagers to design and build a new schoolhouse, using both proven and new con-struction techniques.

This one month practicum didn’t lead to breakthrough innovations, but it did prepare fertile ground. The villagers went from being argumentative and short-

sighted to cooperative and visionary. Each community created tangible results within that one-month practi-cum. The ARU faculty came to coach the students and to hear progress reports from the members in each village:

My colleague, Martha Dolben reported:

“During our recent visit to Uganda, the third year students were in their last week of their village prac-ticum and we were privileged to visit them. Susan Warshauer, Nick Korn, faculty from African Rural University and I spent several afternoons being driven far down narrow dirt tracks to be greeted by a gathering of men, women and children and two ARU students. They were ready to explain their accom-plishments of the past month: visions and current realities articulated, groups formed, goals set, roads repaired, wash rooms and drying racks built, gar-dens dug and planted, and springs cleaned. Most important—interest and energy ignited.

These visits gave me a much clearer picture of the conditions in which over 80% of Ugandans live. Sleeping on dirt floors; suffering insect and water-born diseases; walking long distances for water and firewood; illiterate, superstitious, and ignorant of ba-sics in hygiene and health; working all day in the hot sun to grow cassava and stave off hunger. It is an existence few Americans I know could handle. Yet the ARU students joined right in, living with the peo-ple, and showing them how to improve their lot.

We heard many interesting testimonies from villag-ers. Here are a few:

The host mother where two students lived for a month said this. "I learned two things being with these ARU students. First, a person with good mor-als gains respect in the community. Second, I used to think a good picture was like this one (she points to a poster of Uganda's President Museveni on the wall). Now I know that a good picture is a vision I have in my mind, a picture of the health and happi-ness I can create in this family."

Another woman said, "We are so grateful to these ARU students for being role models for our daugh-ters. Girls here have had no idea of being educated. But now they see these ARU girls who have reached university and are bringing good things to the vil-lage."


28 • Case Study


The Villagers dance to welcome the ARU Staff and visitors who have come to hear about their accomplishments during the 1-month ARU practicum.

Photo: Nick Korn

The ARU students join the villagers in enjoying the dancing and celebration.

Photo: Nick Korn




These projects were all successful, not only in contributing to the development of each village, but in cementing the ARU students’ learning and build-ing their confidence that they can be visionary lead-ers and rural community transformation specialists and change agents. Each team of young women suc-ceeded in following Mwalimu Musheshe’s advice:

“Go to the people.

Live with the people.

Love the people.

Work with the people.

Catalyze the development process

knowing at the end of the day

the people will say, ‘We did it ourselves.’”

4. Network them together and to the “mother ship.” The first group of change agents is just now ready to leave the womb of URDT with their provi-sional degrees: Bachelor of Science in Technologies for Rural Transformation. The degrees will become final once they have proven themselves in the field back in their own communities. The fourth year of the program is designed as a coaching year, in which each change agent will be supported by ARU faculty to answer questions and provide guidance as they learn by doing. The graduates will also be networked through the strong bonds they have formed over the three years and in their women’s circles. They’ll be consulting with one another via mobile phone and Internet (as they gain Internet access in their respec-tive villages). ARU plans a series of conferences in which the graduates will be bringing back their tri-umphs, challenges, and learnings to share with the URDT community and staff. This informal net-worked sharing will also become the mechanism for transferring innovations from one community to other communities. By convening regular meetings to share learnings and to show off the results and inventions that each of their communities has cre-ated, the ARU graduates will be seeding and spread-ing rural development and innovation across Uganda.

HOW TO LAUNCH AND TO REPLICATE YOUR OWN ENGINE OF INNOVATION USING THE URDT BEST PRACTICES

Steep the Organization, Stakeholders and Customers in a Creative Orientation

Many organizations and businesses espouse a “can do” attitude. They hold cultural values of ex-perimentation and innovation. Yet they haven’t in-vested in the education and communication to instill creativity and a creative orientation into the organi-zation. There’s a big difference between having a values statement that says we value creativity, inno-vation and mistakes and actually training your per-sonnel to both practice and promote a creative orientation.

The approach that URDT practices is so simple that illiterate villagers can easily master it. You cre-ate a vision of the outcome you want. You notice the current reality of where you are today. You cherish the tension between the desired vision and your cur-rent reality. You commit to achieving your vision. You experiment until you succeed.

Instill Systems Thinking as a Cultural Norm Everyone who has studied innovation practices

knows that cross-disciplinary teams are often the key to successful innovations. People who look at gaps or problems from very different perspectives will have breakthroughs that elude those who are steeped in one discipline. So by all means, embrace a multi-disciplinary approach to innovation.

But you need to go one more step to steep your team members in holistic, systems thinking. Most engineers are trained in systems thinking. They know about feedback loops and oscillation. They understand that getting the structure right is critical. They learn to spot environmental issues and exter-nalities that impact the structure of the system they are designing.

We encourage you to adopt an approach similar to the one that URDT practices. Make systems thinking part of your organization’s way of ap-proaching problems and understanding the world. Instill systems thinking into your daily dialog and practice.


30 • Case Study


Community members were mobilized by the ARU students to build a new school building for the village.

Photo by Nick Korn

For more exponential progress, URDT is now training women leaders in community development and rural transformation, to multiply the supply of people who do the kind of work they have done, enabling people to be in touch with their aspirations and moral capacities for peace, justice, and a corruption-free society.




Engage Community Members and Stakeholders in Co-Design

In western, developed countries, we tend to rely on experts to design and invent things. Yet these experts often lack the deep context that end-users, practitioners, beneficiaries and customers have. The genius of URDT’s approach to grass roots innova-tion and development is that they engage different groups of community members (different age groups and roles) to co-design their ideal outcomes and ap-proaches. Then they have these groups share their insights and ideas. Then they come up with a plan of action. The experts are there to lend a hand, to an-swer questions, but not to implement. In developing countries, experts’ and outsiders’ solutions are often misunderstood and under-used or abused. Solutions that are designed using local practices and local ma-terials are much more readily adopted and deployed.

Attract and Train Visionary Change Agents Once you become successful in customer-led in-

novation, how do you spread that competency be-yond your innovation lab or R&D group or user-centered design organization? Identify and recruit change agents who can spend two to three years learning by doing, apprenticing with more experi-enced innovators and change agents.

Once they have achieved a level of mastery, have them work on small projects, personal projects and larger projects under the mentorship and coaching of your successful innovation change agents.

Steep Them in the Creative Orientation, and Train Them to Facilitate Innovation

Build apprenticeship into your innovation pro-gram. Remember that you are training change agents and facilitators of innovation. They don’t need to have all of the answers. They do need to be re-sourceful and well-networked to resources and ideas that will be helpful. Their primary role is to get a group of knowledgeable customers and stakeholders from different disciplines and with different skills and perspectives to come up with new approaches that will enable customers to fulfill their visions.

Send Them Out to Work with Customers in the Field

Remember that apprenticeship includes working in the field with customers and stakeholders and co-designing with customers. Let your change agents in training learn by doing, failing, and learning from their mistakes. Provide coaching and celebrate suc-cesses.

Network Them Together and to the “Mother Ship”

Don’t leave your change agents out in the field. Bring them together to learn from one another, to share their experiences, successes, and failures with one another. Have them present their field work to the rest of the organization so that everyone can celebrate and appreciate the customers’ points of view and creativity. Continue to grow your network of change agents. Some will leave and spawn new businesses, but will probably continue to serve you well as ambassadors and change agents. Others will rotate back to the core operations, bringing a fresh perspective to keep your organization customer-focused, and your solutions grounded and relevant.

Contact: Jacqueline Akello, Director of Programmes URDT Ambassador House Plot 50/60 Kampala Road, Entrance D, Rooms 4/6 PO Box 16523 Kampala, Uganda Tel: +256-414-256704 Mobile +256-772-587557 Email: [email protected] Web: http://www.urdt.net


http://www.urdt.net


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32 • Case Study


1 The Barefoot College was founded by Bunker Roy in 1972 “with the conviction that solutions to rural problems lie within the community. The College encourages practical knowledge and skills rather than paper qualifications through a learning by doing process of education. The College addresses problems of drinking water, girls’ education, health & sanitation, rural unemployment, income generation, electricity and power, as well as social awareness and the conservation of eco-logical systems in rural communities. The College serves a population of over 125,000 people both in immediate as well as distant areas. There are now many Barefoot campuses throughout India and in other parts of the world.” From the Barefoot College Web site home page in April, 2009.

2 For a brief history of the Grameen Bank and its beginnings in 1976, please go to: http://www.grameen-info.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=164

3 The approach to the creative process that Robert Fritz developed is now called Technologies for Creating®. It was origi-nally taught as a course called “DMA” by Silvana Veltkamp to Ephrem Rutaboba and Mwalimu Musheshe in the 1980s, and was first chronicled in Robert Fritz’s seminal book, The Path of Least Resistance, (New York: Ballantine Books, re-vised edition, 1989)

4 For a good overview of Systems Thinking, see Wikipedia’s articles, starting with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking. Mwalimu Musheshe also studied with Peter Senge, many of whose prin-ciples are described in his seminal book, The Fifth Discipline, (Doubleday Business, 1994).

http://www.grameen-info.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=164



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking


urdt lessons 2009

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