Boatcamp 2016: A Social Entrepreneurship Workshop at Sea

Building on our relationship after working together on our plastic bag project, Excess Baggage, Fondazione ACRA engaged Quicksand to facilitate one of the working groups on Boatcamp - a four-day workshop for budding social entrepreneurs. Boatcamp took place in the context of a cruise between Rome and Barcelona, and addressed the unique problems faced by eight business cases identified internationally from a diverse range of contexts. Fondazione ACRA - in association with OPES Impact Fund and Compagnia Di San Paulo - invited over 300 participants, established mentors and expert speakers in social entrepreneurship to innovate on the development of sustainable high-impact business models.

Quicksand was asked to facilitate the leadership of the groups addressing one of these eight business cases. We worked with social entrepreneur, Biko Evarist, to analyse the unique problems facing his business, Education and Entrepreneurship (E & E) - an educational organisation to support young people in rural Tanzania who had missed opportunities to continue their learning beyond the age of 13. Rishabh and Tom worked with Biko and their 34 allocated participants to study Biko's business case, deconstructing it collectively, identifying high-impact areas for improvement and reconstructing the business case as a compelling story attractive to potential funders.

In addressing the challenges facing E & E, the team were fortunate in being able to make use of the expertise of experts such as Jack Sim from the World Toilet Association and Martin Burt from Fundacion Paraguay. Following E & E's board meeting the day after returning to land, Biko reported that the company has received follow on funding to continue the expansion of their operation.

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May 2016 Brown Paper Bag Presentation, World Bank: Using Human Centered Design to Address Development Challenges

With international development facing increasingly complex challenges deeply dependent on a web of inter-connected issues pertaining to behavior change, technology and policy, approaching these problems with the right framework is essential for global development actors. Human Centered-Design is a tool that can help bring the human perspective to the design and planning of holistic, innovative programs focused on basic service delivery such as healthcare, sanitation or waste management. Ayush presented Human Centered Design as a tool to address some of the most pressing development challenges, pulling examples from healthcare, water and sanitation, and waste management. Case studies included rethinking sanitation services in urban slums in India, improving diagnostics for detecting malnutrition in the remote parts of war-torn South Sudan and reducing plastic bag waste in one of the fastest growing economies of the Indochina region, Cambodia. The presentation was followed by a discussion on the existing World Bank projects involving an innovation mandate in a variety of areas.

May 2016 Workshop on Speculative Futures, Government and Policy Strategy Conference, Insitute of Design, IIT Chicago

The need for reform within governments and public institutions across the world has never been more acute. As the relationship between the governing and the governed gets re-balanced, governments are forced to think of new ways of delivering on services that are more responsive to an even more demanding electorate. This is especially true of emerging economies of South and South East Asia, where the scale of developmental challenges that beset nations, is grossly mismatched by the knowledge and capacities that public institutions have to address those. While Governments take stock of this widening gap between expectations and their capacity to deliver, other developments in the field of social innovation, technology and media point to new ways in which these challenges may be overcome.

Ayush hosted a workshop at the Strategy Conference to examine some pertinent challenges of our times whether it pertains to health, environment, financial inclusion, energy or food security. Participants were asked to reflect on a diverse set of issues and challenges from their respective contexts. Through an exercise of design fiction (modeled on Stuart Candy's Reverse Archaeoology and Time Machine), and taking inspiration from the opening session of the conference on trends shaping our societies today, the group arrived at speculative futures that demonstrate how potential solutions reposition and reimagine the role of governments vis-a-vis the general public.

Nov 2015 SIX Summer School - Mumbai

Principal and Communications Lead Kevin Shane was part of an expert panel at the SIX Summer School in Mumbai which discussed innovation in the water and sanitation space, both in India and globally. Using Quicksand's work in the space, specifically the Potty Project and Project Sammaan, Kevin shared the challenges inherent in experimenting and innovating in a context fraught with challenges and one that affects billions of people around the world. The panel featured representatives from around the world, and stressed the need for collaboration across all stakeholders to develop solutions that are sustainable in the long-term and implementable in the short-term. An annual event, SIX Summer Schools bring together leading social innovation thinkers and practitioners from across the world to explore some of the key issues facing the field – such as scaling and innovation in crisis settings.

Jul 2015 University of Chicago IIC Annual Workshop

Co-founder Ayush Chauhan spoke at the annual workshop of the University of Chicago Center in Delhi commemorating the graduating class of International Innovation Corps, a year long fellowship program that sends top student talent to work with Indian government on critical development problems. Ayush's panel was on Last Mile Connectivity focusing on how successfully piloted solutions and interventions can be effectively rolled out and adopted across the target audience.

Ayush led by saying that the design of good quality, sustainable pilots required program teams to champion the last mile - that moment of truth when all the careful deliberation on systems, policy and enabling institutions meets the consumer. Using Quicksand's work on the direct benefit transfers project and the urban sanitation project as examples, he demonstrated how an ostensibly powerful, transformative public policy begins to break down when no one champions the end-user.

After sharing a few observations from the two projects, Ayush spoke of the value of human centered design (HCD) as an approach to work through these very challenges, highlighting three core aspects of HCD:

- Understand end-user experience (to integrate people centered research as a part of one's personal repertoire of skills and tools and not relegate it to commissioned studies)

- Co-create solutions (learn to involve stakeholders early on from a wide spectrum of specializations no matter how ambiguous and unclear the problem may be at the moment)

- Make prototyping and testing a continuous part of the process (move it out of the domain of just pilots and make it a part of program scale up and implementation as well)

Ayush's Presentation

Jul 2015 BonaResponds Podcast

Communications Lead and Business Head (U.S. Operations) Kevin Shane was the guest host of St. Bonaventure University's BonaResponds podcast. Kevin, a St. Bona alumnus, spoke about his experiences living and working overseas, his role in the innovative, design-led sanitation initiative Project Sammaan, and his activities supporting an upcoming cultural exchange program that will bring 20 college students from Haiti to the United States.

Listen to the full podcast here or download it for free via BonaResponds' channel on iTunes.

Quicksand

Boatcamp 2016: A Social Entrepreneurship Workshop at Sea

June 10th, 2016 in Publishing & Appearances

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