rurale Innovation

In my last blogpost, I shared my take on what innovation could and should do for development. To serve both economic as well as human and environmentalist concerns, innovation must be value-creating, leverage-oriented and resource-conserving. ‘So what?’ you might think. After all, what International Development needs least is yet another debate on terms and theories, isn’t it? Knowing that innovation can work as a catalyst for development (in all of its forms), the million-dollar question is how do we bring the ‘most developmental innovation’ to life?
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Just a couple of weeks ago, I came back from Rwanda where we are implementing a “Design for Innovation” Training on behalf of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). Innovation has come to the forefront of the development discourse – and development practice – within the last years. Recently, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) announced the launch of its network of 60 so-called ‘Accelerator Labs’ spanning across nearly eighty countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America. To put it in UNDP’s own terms, the initiative is aimed at “re-imagining development for the 21st century”. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
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