Societal Thinking https://societalthinking.org/ Wed, 18 Mar 2026 06:30:38 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://societalthinking.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cropped-apple-touch-icon-32x32.png Societal Thinking https://societalthinking.org/ 32 32 Distributing the ability to solve: Moving knowledge faster with ECHO https://societalthinking.org/blog/distributing-the-ability-to-solve-moving-knowledge-faster-with-with-echo/ Tue, 02 Dec 2025 12:14:33 +0000 https://societalthinking.org/?p=9311 How can medical knowledge reach practitioners at the right time to save lives?

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When a 43-year-old woman sought treatment for Hepatitis C eight years after her diagnosis, Dr. Sanjeev Arora was stunned. If cared for in time, Hepatitis C can be completely cured. The woman, however, succumbed to the disease. When he connected the dots – her socio-economic circumstances, lack of medical care in her community and barriers to accessing care farther away from home – he realised the right medical knowledge wasn’t reaching the right place at the right time. Especially at a time when medical knowledge was growing rapidly, he realised it takes 18 years for knowledge to move from experts to frontline health workers.

As he wondered what would enable patients to access high-quality medical care where they are,  Dr. Sanjeev set up Project ECHO in 2003. With an ‘All Teach, All Learn’ model, Project ECHO enables specialists and community health workers to share expertise and insights – moving knowledge, not people. The ECHO model of connecting knowledge and people goes beyond traditional telemedicine (one provider connecting with one patient at a time) to a virtual connection between a specialist hub team and learners at multiple primary care sites, or spokes. 

From delivering knowledge to distributing the ability to solve

In the initial years, the ECHO team curated the information communities needed and the experts who could teach it. As the hubs grew, they encountered a roadblock – if the ECHO team continued playing the role of matchmaker, could they really solve at scale?

They realised that to solve at scale, they needed to think differently. Could they create a space where multiple healthcare actors such as specialists, experts, frontline workers, could offer and access the right knowledge to each other without ECHO playing the matchmaker?

This shift led them to build iECHO – a digital platform to improve health outcomes for 1 billion people. Here, partners and practitioners can track programme outcomes, engage with one another and enhance their knowledge through collaborative learning and discussions from experts around the world.

iECHO enables many actors to solve by enabling collective wisdom. iECHO has a repository of knowledge from sessions, experts and on-ground contextual insights. This repository can be accessed and added to by the network of practitioners on the platform. As more healthcare practitioners engage with the iECHO platform, their insights are fed back into the system, enabling faster detection and treatment. 

iECHO is designed for scale because it distributes the ability to solve. This intentional design decision comes from the belief that no one organisation or solution can address complex problems at scale. Instead, what is needed is building and enhancing the ability of key actors to solve. This ability is characterised by clarity about the role, the knowledge and skills needed to do it best, adequate time and supportive peers.

Especially in a field like medicine where a few experts hold the latest knowledge and resources, iECHO works towards democratising expertise, as well as, having participants add contextual insights for others to learn from and use – developing a pool of collective wisdom. Over time, actors beyond the ECHO team are equipped to act and solve.

As Project ECHO moved from solving context-to-context to distributing the ability of actors across the healthcare system to solve for their needs and circumstances, they realised the gap between knowledge creation and diffusion is large in domains other than healthcare as well. Could the ECHO model plug this gap?

Beyond healthcare – Enabling others to solve faster

Project ECHO began exploring what it would mean to deploy the ECHO model in other domains to distribute the ability to solve. 

With INREM Foundation, they are addressing water quality issues in India. INREM uses the ECHO Model to train “Water Quality Champions” – community actors who are trained on water quality management. By leveraging the ECHO model, INREM is fostering open discussion, breaking communication barriers, and encouraging Water Quality Champions to share experiences from the field.

In education, ShikshaLokam has collaborated with Project ECHO to improve the quality of teacher training. building the capacity of school teachers, educating them on vaccinations, young girls’ health, and other essential issues.

In the US, the police department has utilised the ECHO Model to train officers in recognising the severity of threats and taking appropriate action. This training has enhanced their response capabilities by providing access to critical knowledge and expertise.

By creating a pathway for knowledge to reach the right people at the right time, Project ECHO has accelerated problem-solving across contexts. Today, many journey partners at C4EC are exploring how they can use the ECHO model to move knowledge faster in the domain / problem they are solving for, to distribute the ability to solve.

P.S. ECHO is Centre for Exponential Change’s exChange Partner – organisations that offer building blocks, as well as, help design and prototype new ideas.

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]]> The power of public goods https://societalthinking.org/blog/the-power-of-public-goods/ Tue, 25 Nov 2025 12:56:12 +0000 https://societalthinking.org/?p=9108 The power of digital public goods is this: once the foundational building blocks are in place, the power to solve increases exponentially.

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When COVID-19 hit India, an unprecedented lockdown followed. Keeping essential services and manufacturing running became a challenge. Neither hospitals nor factories can run without the people who run them. Manufacturing needs raw materials to be transported as well. All of these needed permissions to travel, and police needed a reliable way to identify them.

At eGov Foundation, a small team collaborated with volunteers and worked round the clock to create a National e-Pass system in five days. The e-Pass ensured that essential services and industries could operate during lockdowns. By May 2020, eight states were using e-Pass, and a total of over 9 Lakh journeys were made possible during the course of the year by the e-Pass system.

The creation of the e-Pass in less than a week was a beautiful moment. It was also the culmination of a two-decade journey — the secret to its swift creation and going live was the digital platform on which it was built: DIGIT, the Digital Infrastructure for Governance, Impact, and Transformation.

eGov had been leveraging DIGIT to enable local governments across India to deliver services to citizens – and citizens to apply for those services – for a number of years before the pandemic.

DIGIT is an open-source software platform, consisting of multiple digital building blocks, which can be assembled and reassembled to create solutions for a wide range of governance and service delivery functions. This enables rapid collaboration, leading to the creation of a wide range of contextual solutions which can be rapidly scaled – such as the e-Pass. The team was able to adapt existing building blocks from DIGIT, reassembling them into the configuration e-Pass needed.

This is the power of digital public goods: once the foundational building blocks are in place, the power to solve increases exponentially.

From Point Solutions to Platforms and Ecosystems

Given the urgency of the pandemic, it’s easy to see the e-Pass as a story about rapid solutions. The deeper story, though, is about what digital governance can achieve when it understands people’s needs and meets them where they are. Sadly, this is not yet the norm in most of India: only a handful of towns offer omni-channel services, and even there the  citizen experience tends to be poor.

A simple task, like paying one’s municipal taxes, is unduly hard. Even where a digital solution ostensibly exists, the first step — generating the OTP — can fail and stall the entire process. The user experience is confusing and complex. As my 82-year-old father often says, “Son, you work with governments, why can’t you ask them to make it as easy as using PayTM?” He obviously does not look forward to the 16 km round trip he is going to have to make to the municipal office.

At eGov, for nearly 12 years, we worked in the trenches with city and state governments on this problem — “easy, accessible, and transparent citizen services”. We built deep knowledge of the context of the particular city, and worked with a missionary zeal to create and implement solutions that work there. As a philanthropic mission, we felt the weight of responsibility in making life easier for citizens.

We had islands of success, but overall progress remained slow; the challenge was to improve governance at national scale, and point solutions – effective in their own right – weren’t getting us there fast enough. This, while digital platforms were becoming the norm globally, and companies in India were making giant leaps in leveraging these platforms for improving access and ease of service for consumers. We celebrated the changes brought by UPI, delivery apps, ride-hailing; we kept asking ourselves, why should getting services from your local government be any harder?

In 2016, I joined eGov, as part of a new leadership team. We started thinking deeply about what makes it “hard” to solve at scale and speed.

We realised building and implementing solutions by ourselves would exhaust us, with nowhere near the scale of impact we need. Instead, we started asking: how do we increase the capacity of the ecosystem to solve?

What if eGov becomes a catalyst – rather than a doer – to spur massive, open, easy collaboration between Samaaj (citizens), Sarkaar (governments), and Bazaar (market enterprises)? What if eGov as a mission invests in building open, free-to-use digital building blocks, to increase the capacity of this Samaaj-Sarkaar-Bazaar ecosystem — empowering them to solve problems at scale.

eGov 2.0 was born from this question, and the idea of DIGIT was conceived. An open, interoperable, free-to-use platform that offers solutions for citizens, first mile employees, administrators, commercial players, policy makers, innovators – every stakeholder in effective governance. States, cities, and commercial players can use the building blocks from DIGIT to tailor solutions and programs that meet their needs, and continuously innovate on top of it to solve emerging problems. The wide range of solutions and even new building blocks they develop in turn widen the range of possibilities for all stakeholders using the platform.

Proposing the Shift

We had our model – now we had to build the muscles to implement it. That wasn’t something eGov could do alone; we needed allies and supporters, including people who were ready to invest in this new approach. Creating a digital platform as a public good is foundational work, It takes time and commitment, and – until it reaches its tipping point – results are sub-linear. We have to have faith to get to that point. At eGov, we were lucky – we found investors who shared this mindset.

On an unusually cold January morning, we presented our vision, strategy and operating plan to a group that included Tata Trusts, Omidyar Network, Nandan Nilekani, and our trustees. We had a 3-member team that worked on the strategy and operating plan for over 2 months, and we were all nervous going in. What we were proposing was clearly a moonshot: to transform 2000 cities and towns by 2020.

In the first 30 minutes – as we presented the approach and vision – there was a broad agreement. But no deep questions, no signs of enthusiasm. In the second half of the hour, we presented a 5-year operating plan, with details on demand generation, platform build, key operating principles, key milestones and markers we would hit along the way – and financial projections for the next 5 years.

Something clicked. People in the room started leaning forward, asking questions, and advising us based on their experiences. Then we made a clear ask for the  capital: >Rs. 120 Crores over five years Silence. Then one of the investors said, “this is the kind of investment needed to make systemic changes.” That was the ‘release’ moment – suddenly the discussion turned from why to how the capital can be arranged, how it can be sequenced and phased, and so on.

Faith and Patience

Over the next nine months, all three investors came on board, and we raised a total of Rs. 60 crores (~$9 million) for the first phase of the plan. In hindsight, two things worked for us: the boldness of the vision, and the fact that it was backed by a 5-year operating plan. The ‘2000 by 2020’ mission got investors excited about the impact possibility, and the operating plan gave them assurance that the team has the capability to execute.

Our investors brought more to the table than funding alone. Nandan Nilekani’s experience with digital platforms, including Aadhar and UPI, was a useful reference point and source of guidance; he was also able to connect us to others in the ecosystem who could share first-hand knowledge and experience. The emphasis that both Omidyar Network India and Tata Trusts placed on last-mile access aligned with and shaped how we looked at this mission: it is not just about making cities more capable, but rather about ensuring citizens receive the services to which they are entitled.

These shared values and experiences built on, and in turn fed back into, a key factor that has let us make this journey: the trust that we repose in each other.

Being aligned on the vision and strategy helps eGov be confident that our investors have got our back. They understand that improving urban governance, especially when one is building the capacity to solve rather than scaling solutions, is a slow and complex process – and they are with us for the long haul.

The Moment of Truth

In turn, our investors know that we are committed to the mission, and will persist with our efforts to understand, catalyse, and develop the ecosystem. This resilience to stay the course, especially in the early days, is crucial when undertaking the foundational work of building a digital public good.

As with the e-Pass, the rewards to doing this work – patiently and persistently – can be remarkable when they materialise. In Punjab, for instance, the state government had unsuccessfully gone through multiple rounds of trying to procure an e-governance software for their urban local bodies (ULBs). The bids they received tended to be both too expensive – in the range of Rs. 200 crores, with additional costs anticipated around data migration – and too time-consuming, with the estimated time to completion starting at 2 years at the minimum.

In 2017, the Punjab government and eGov began speaking about how DIGIT could be an alternative for the state, leading to a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) being signed in February 2018. The implementation plan was developed with the objective of rapid, cost-efficient roll-out, together with creation of capacity within the state government itself to implement and maintain the system.

The results speak for themselves: DIGIT was implemented statewide at the cost of Rs. 7 crores (~ $1 million) – barely 4% of the cost cited in other bids. It was implemented in record time – going live in 100 of the state’s approximately 170 ULBs in 90 days, and across the entire state within a year of signing the MOU. As of Dec 2021, the platform has already handled more than 1.5 million service requests and grievances, and Rs. 1010 crores in revenue collections.

Punjab was able to launch its own COVID response leveraging some of DIGIT’s capabilities as well, piloting a WhatsApp chatbot for persons in self-isolation / home quarantine during the lockdown. Building on this experience, Punjab has now brought substantial portions of its public grievance redressal (PGR) service on to a WhatsApp chatbot as well. With more than 400 million users in India, WhatsApp is far more familiar to citizens than any specialised app, and creating a channel for filing requests and grievances there helps bring the government even closer to citizens.

Citizens have real time visibility of the status of their request, who is handling it, and when they can rightfully expect it to be resolved. In addition they get to rate how well the service is delivered. As Reena Kaur, a young woman running a small food stall in the state of Punjab says, “earlier I had to constantly follow up with municipal employees, now they follow up with me and request me to provide a star rating”.

Today we are actively working with more than 50 stakeholders, across Samaaj, Sarkaar, and Bazaar. We find that end results are far better through this ecosystem-based approach, compared to the time we did everything ourselves. Not only do we get a scale advantage, as multiple programs run in parallel – as of today there are 7 programs in progress in 14 states – but speed has improved as well. In Feb 2021, the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs announced the National Urban Digital Mission, recognising the importance of the DPG (Digital Public Goods) -based approach to bringing efficient and inclusive service delivery to every city and town in India by 2024.

So far come, so far to go

We now look at all our work, both with DIGIT and with newer platforms, through the lens of DPG. A DPG-based approach frees up resources to focus on critical non-technology elements of governance reforms, such as improving service delivery, or enhancing ease of doing business, that seldom get enough focus and funding.

Our journey started with the question – “why should it be so hard?”. Why should anyone have to struggle to get simple things done? Our response was to build a DPG, and to catalyse an open ecosystem where governments, NGOs and commercial actors collaborate to build solutions and programs that deliver accessible, timely, and transparent services to citizens.

In this journey, we’ve learned that real magic happens when the ecosystem comes together, re-imagines new possibilities,  and creates impact in ways far greater than our beginnings might have suggested.

Five years ago, who could have thought that the DPG we are building for urban service delivery could extend to a sanitation platform, or become a key part of COVID response?
Next time you encounter a wicked social challenge, work hard on understanding the pivotal problems that restrict the agency and capability of the actors involved and think about creating a set of tools and infrastructure that can truly bring the actors together to build solutions and programs that solve the problems at scale.

Also, think hard about non-technology components like enablement, playbooks and market catalysis. In our experience, these often play a larger part than technology in solving at scale. Finally, one should keep in mind that while tech can help solve problems and increase capacity to act, there are social challenges around trust and collaboration that need to be addressed to truly realise the societal value of DPGs.

This is all foundational work, slow and iterative. If you are interested in large-scale, tech-enabled transformational change, your horizon should be at 5 or even 10 years. Investing in this work requires a lot of patience, because impact tends to be non-linear. When it all clicks – when the openness of the system catalyses collaboration and innovation – the value delivered to society can be significantly greater, and can come in more forms than what we initially imagined.

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]]> Restoring the agency of youth to solve small, dent big https://societalthinking.org/blog/restoring-the-agency-of-youth-to-solve-small-dent-big/ Mon, 24 Nov 2025 13:00:47 +0000 https://societalthinking.org/?p=9080 What if everyone could see, sense and solve the problems they face? What if everyone – citizens, NGOs, government and private sector actors – could be a change leader?

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Choking air pollution, foaming lakes, open garbage dumps, uncovered drains, potholed and bumpy roads – when we look around and really see the world we live in, its various social issues appear complex and daunting. Where do we begin solving for a better world? Where do we find hope? Most importantly, who can solve these ever-changing problems as they arise?

What if everyone could see, sense and solve the problems they face? What if everyone – citizens, NGOs, government and private sector actors – could be a change leader?

Making these ‘what ifs’ reality begins with acknowledging the barriers to effective problem-solving communities face. Some of these are:

  • Recognising the problem
    Often, social issues we’re repeatedly exposed to become normalised to the point of not seeming like issues at all! Think about, for instance, the garbage scattered across roads. Unseemly and unsanitary as it is, it sometimes becomes a regular part of life for many communities. “This is how it is,” we come to think.

  • Connecting local problems to larger global ones
    Global problems such as climate change seem far more important than our local issues. However, all global issues boil down to many many local issues, distinct yet interconnected. For instance, the city Bengaluru in India loses about 160 million litres of water a day in leakages! The sheer amount of water wasted and the electricity needed to pump water together create enormous detrimental environmental impact. If communities understand that solving small can help solve bigger issues, will solving local problems become more worthwhile?

  • Responsibility and power to solve
    Living in a world organised around different loci of power, i.e., government bodies, bureaucracy, social work organisations and so on, problem-solving frequently feels like someone else’s problem “someone will come and solve the problems for me.” At the same time, it is difficult for the few in power to give up control of decision-making for all.

These realities mean that today, less than 1% of citizens are actively engaged in problem-solving in their neighbourhoods. And, it is these neighbourhoods that make cities, states and countries!

What our imagined world needs is all hands on deck.

Levers of change

We believe distributing the ability and ownership of solving to communities and restoring their agency is the key to solving at scale and sustaining the change. For us, at Reap Benefit, scale is local actors solving local instances of global problems. We have witnessed the power of restoring agency of communities by creating an enabling environment – be it key stakeholders coming together or creating capabilities to solve by leveraging technology.

Three key levers of change have emerged for us:

The first, think local, solve global. Every global phenomenon has a local manifestation. Every local solution to a global problem sparks a cycle of change. Local actions have the power to shape policies and create systemic change. We work with communities to spread this awareness of Think Local, Solve Global.

Secondly, activate the youth. The youth, for us, embody enthusiasm, vitality, hope and the possibilities of tomorrow. We enable a brigade of young change-leaders called ‘Solve Ninjas’. The youth’s desire to grow, supported by our team, has not just an immediate impact in their communities but also in the development of a long-term mindset of problem solving in them.

Finally, focus on the process and not the solution. One solution can be effective in some use cases and not in others. Coming up with local solutions should be a participatory process, involving multiple and diverse stakeholders. Once the agency of the community is activated and they have the tools to look at diverse solutions, they usually decide what works best for their circumstances. So, we don’t prescribe solutions, we only enable the way for communities to find solutions.

Denting big

#SolveSmallDentBig – This is the simple mantra that thousands of our Solve Ninjas embody on a day-to-day basis. Solve Ninjas have worked on civic issues in their locality ranging from fixing foul-smelling blackspots, reporting infrastructural issues to their locally elected representatives, campaigning for lake rejuvenation and green cover protection, designing and implementing innovative solutions, creating air quality monitors to even starting their own social enterprises!

The small changes that the Solve Ninjas make in their communities, collectively adds up to a large impact. But, it also creates systemic change. We have witnessed those in power becoming more willing to engage these youth as partners, as they can see the change the empowered ninjas can bring.

Elected representatives have begun seeking information and engaging more with citizens, policies have started looking at maintenance and sustenance, going beyond just implementation or problem-solving.

Moreover, once Ninjas solve a few issues, their agency gets restored and they start aspiring for more. They start seeing more problems and looking for bolder solutions. For example, Solve Ninja Shriya Shankar now runs Project Sitara, an organisation that provides education to young girls from underserved communities, Vibha Nadig’s Outlawed demystifies the legal system, Taanika Shankar founded Yugma, a collective of college unions from around the country committed to fighting ill-conceived legislation that affects the environment.

As more and more young people join the Solve Ninja movement, networks of solvers are activated. These networks focus on certain issues but also work jointly to amplifying each other’s efforts, leading to an exponential #SolveSmallDentBig.

Empowering the youth to see, sense and solve

The core that we are trying to solve is how to build the ‘civic muscle’ in young people – a mixture of agency, ownership and the skill to solve problems supported by the community. Civic muscle helps Solve Ninjas in tackling a range of issues as they crop up. We enable Civic muscle with:

  1. DISS
    A framework called Discover Investigate Solve Share (DISS) functions as a hands-on problem solving framework, rooted in skills the youth may already have and some they may need to learn. When the youth discover a problem, investigate its root causes and solve it themselves, they build agency, gain ownership and take accountability. To highlight problems for the youth, we use a range of techniques to enable ‘discovery’ of the issue and translate it into actionable inspiration with inward-facing questions such as “How did you feel when you saw x issue?” This enables the youth to recognise and verbalise their feelings towards the problem, driving them to solving.

  2. Technology
    We leverage technology to distribute leadership in a way that it’s easy for everyone to participate. So, we leverage channels and tools our youth are on such as WhatsApp, maps and chatbots. When we build new tools, we build them on top of popular channels. So, that most Ninja’s can access and add to a pool of crowdsourced information, request help, offer mentorship, connect and solve. We ensure that technology has to be simple to use at the front for the Ninja’s, all the complexities can be moved to the backend.

  3. Fail fast, learn faster
    Local problems need local solutions, sometimes new, sometimes adapted and sometimes adopted. But finding the right solution is a series of hits and trials. Developing the attitude of “Fail fast, learn faster” within our team and most importantly in our army of Solve Ninja’s has ensured rapid evolution of solutions.

Reap Benefit is empowering young people to exercise agency and use their voice to solve problems in their community and, in turn, build invaluable leadership skills for a brighter future. We hope to build a nation led by young leaders who eagerly solve problems at the grassroots level.

Read more about Core Values of Societal Thinking.

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]]> When civil society, State and markets work together https://societalthinking.org/blog/when-civil-society-state-and-markets-work-together/ Mon, 24 Nov 2025 08:05:51 +0000 https://societalthinking.org/?p=9067 The sustained power of SAYouth lies in the fact that it is more than a platform: it is the embodiment of a vast ecosystem, with a shared vision and aligned interests.

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South Africa is the most unequal society in the world, and nowhere does this manifest more dramatically than in the youth unemployment rate. Official 2025 data also reveals that among youth aged 15 to 34, nearly 1.9 million are classified as discouraged job seekers. Of approximately 10.3 million people in the 15–24 age group, well over 60% are unemployed, and over half report no prior work experience. 

These young people will search for opportunity for years in the face of scams, misleading adverts, and a lack of credible information. They will bear burdensome search costs, such as disproportionately expensive transport and internet access. And if they do manage to find and successfully apply for a job, exclusionary hiring practices – such as adverts for entry level positions that require years of experience, or qualifications that have little to do with the actual work – often keep them locked out. The situation is particularly dire for young women, whose barriers to work-seeking are higher and harder than they are for young men.

Over the years, South Africa’s unemployment challenge has attracted significant public and private investment that flows to various forms of post-school education and training each year. While there has been some success, efforts are disjointed and poorly coordinated across states, markets and civil society. There are many reasons for this. Some have to do with the social, economic and geographic legacies of apartheid; others are a result of infrastructure challenges in delivery.

But there’s another, deeper reason that has increasing importance for how we address the challenge:  The continued prevalence of outdated assumptions about the transition from education to employment.Much of the investment that has flowed into addressing the unemployment crisis has rested on a fundamental belief that “more skills / degrees / training leads automatically to a leg up on opportunity”. But this truism is under assault from every side around the world:

The linear pathway from school, to university, to a first job in a lifelong career, is vanishing.

Jobless growth, coupled with rising automation and the changing nature of employment, mean that the jobs of tomorrow do not look like the jobs of yesterday. In South Africa’s case, the sheer scale of investment has created a level of institutional incumbency that hampers efforts to adapt to these seismic shifts. 

We pull together, for scale

Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator was founded in 2011 as a social enterprise designed to solve youth unemployment through partnerships.

Partnering is in our DNA: the very name Harambee – which, in Swahili, means “we pull together”— was chosen to evoke the need for collaboration across government, the private sector, and civil society. For us, this was the need of the hour to solve at scale, since no one actor alone can tackle such a big problem.

Our early days partnering with the South Africa National Treasury’s Jobs Fund gave rise to regional partnerships with the City of Johannesburg and the Gauteng Provincial Government – the country’s economic hub. With youth unemployment climbing to record levels during the pandemic (over 66% for youth age 15-24, at the last release of Stats SA’s Quarterly Labour Force survey), this coalition of stakeholders acknowledged the inadequacy of status quo approaches and sought a bolder, more systemic response.

To solve a problem this massive, everyone needs to be an equally invested partner, wanting to solve together. In April 2019, the Presidential Youth Employment Intervention (PYEI) was established as South Africa’s national plan of action on youth unemployment. It is supported by a dedicated project management office in the Presidency that coordinates the efforts of state and non-state actors. It has defined a ‘national pathway management network’ – new, transformational infrastructure to support the transition from education to work – as its first priority.

SA Youth

SA Youth, the anchor platform for the national pathway management network, is a multi-stakeholder partnership between government, the private sector and civil society, in which Harambee is an anchor member. SA Youth addresses many barriers faced by young people. 

  • It is a zero-rated, free-to-use website that can be accessed through any device, supported by a toll-free support line.
  • By aggregating learning and earning opportunities from as many partners as possible in the private sector, government, and civil society in a single place and for free, SA Youth ensures that millions of unemployed young work-seekers, no matter where they live or what their circumstances, can easily access credible information that links them to the right opportunities. 
  • This service is delivered through both platform intelligence (with data-powered recommendations) and the human intelligence of hundreds of “guides,” most of whom are specially-trained youth from very similar demographics, who staff a toll-free hotline answering young unemployed callers’ questions and directing them to resources.

The platform also creates enormous value for its institutional participants. For employers seeking to increase inclusive hiring, the network represents a pool of formerly invisible talent that’s pre-qualified and well-supported through the process. Most importantly, SAYouth provides a heat map of the human resources of the future, which is especially critical for emergent industries seeking to harness South Africa’s young, English-speaking, “high-EQ” workforce to power growth.

This form of shared-value creation makes the platform uniquely suited to enable a coordinated, sector-level approach that spans young people, employers, industry bodies and skilling providers.

Take the example of plumbing – a skilled role in high and growing demand: through collaboration and an enabling partnership between Harambee and the Institute of Plumbing in South Africa (IOPSA), the sector has identified root causes of its challenges in appropriately sourcing and skilling young people as artisans who are ready to tackle their apprenticeships with willing and supportive employers. In response, it has now introduced two game-changing education models for plumbing.

Over time, the platform itself will learn, showing us which pathways and interventions work well; where demand is unmet; and which barriers remain. With growing data, intelligence and capabilities, this platform can serve as a powerful infrastructure for inclusive growth.

Now, Harambee is on the journey to recruit a further 3 million young people into the network and enable at least 1 million pathways into concrete opportunities and increased income through the formal and informal sectors and public employment.

Importantly, we hope to ensure that SA Youth creates value to a young person even when they are not in employment–building their employability profiles between jobs. In doing so, we hope to deal a death blow to the intergenerational cycle of joblessness, and lay the foundation of a society that works, with an economy that is powered by the potential of all young people.

Lessons learnt from Thinking & Designing for scale…

Into that future, we will bring a our decade’s worth of lessons maybe  hold value for any organisation seeking to make a dent in youth unemployment – or indeed any complex, entrenched social problem:

  • First, we cultivated and leveraged ‘hard demand’
    This is distinct from voicing demand for change; it means identifying real growth opportunities that can absorb young people, given the changing nature of work. For Harambee and our partners, starting on the demand side of the labour market to find unfilled vacancies, and targeting the companies and sectors where a talent shortfall is a gating factor on growth, generated “pull” rather than push for solutions and brought a wider range of motivated partners to the table.

  • Second, we tested, pilot, and prototype at the point of friction
    Even if the destination is to create industrial-strength infrastructure, begin with small interventions aimed at the points of market failure (in our case, the point at which a young person with potential misses out on a viable opportunity) and build the platform architecture up from there, designing for the lived realities of the most excluded. For us, that has enabled the creation of a platform that has young people–and young women in particular – firmly at the centre.

  • Lastly, we needed to  scale ecosystem, not a product or solution
    Most organisations and funders tend to want to scale their solutions. With a multi-dimensional and moving problem like youth unemployment, falling in love with our own solutions meant  a risk that we would  stop following the problem and instead become another institutional interest in the system. Durable impact means taking a systems lens to solve ecosystem challenges; in our case, working with a vast and disparate range of partners on everything from advocating to reduce mobile data costs, to prototyping new funding models for training, to advising on sector-specific talent master plans. This last learning is perhaps the greatest.  

The sustained power of SAYouth lies in the fact that it is more than a platform: it is the embodiment of a vast ecosystem, with a shared vision and aligned interests. The true magic happens when states, markets and social enterprises work together. The saying “To go fast, go alone; to go far, go together,” has always resonated deeply in the African context. But for those of us seeking to change the trajectory of employment in South Africa, it has never been truer.

Want to think scale too? Read more.

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]]> What If the Key to Innovation Is Letting Go? https://societalthinking.org/blog/what-if-the-key-to-innovation-is-letting-go/ Thu, 18 Sep 2025 10:52:58 +0000 https://societalthinking.org/?p=9047 For too long, we’ve relied on lone heroes - visionaries, policymakers, corporations - to single-handedly solve large issues. But complex problems don’t have singular solutions; they need ecosystems.

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Every morning, as I walk my 10-year-old daughter to her school bus, we have our little conversations; sometimes about her homework, sometimes about the latest playground drama, and sometimes about the big problems of the world. One day, as we stood waiting, watching her bus inch forward through the traffic, she sighed and said, “Acchha, why don’t they just build a road straight from our house to my school? Then I’d never be late!” I chuckled and asked, “How many such roads do you think we’d need for every child, every school, every workplace?” She thought for a moment and shrugged. “Yes, that’s a lot!”. “But if we can’t build so many roads, why allow so many vehicles,”she asked. I smiled. “That’s a great question, traffic is a whole other problem altogether.”

Some problems seem straightforward; until you start pulling at the threads. Urban mobility, climate action, and energy transition are all tangled knots of interdependencies, shaping and reshaping each other in ways we can’t always predict. Traffic isn’t just about roads; it’s also about pollution, public health, economic opportunity, and urban design. Climate action isn’t just about reducing emissions; it’s also about industry, consumer behaviour, government policy, and technology moving in sync and many more. The energy transition isn’t just about renewables; it’s also about grid resilience, distributed generation, and economic incentives. These aren’t linear problems with single solutions. They are living, evolving systems. Yet, too often, we apply rigid, curated solutions as if we’re pruning a garden, when in reality, we’re navigating a forest.

What if we stopped trying to impose artificial order on these organic, interconnected systems? 

For too long, we’ve relied on lone heroes – visionaries, policymakers, corporations – to single-handedly solve large issues. But complex problems don’t have singular solutions; they need ecosystems.

Infrastructure Thinking Over Point-to-Point Solutions

History is full of such examples. The internet began as ARPANET, a military project, but by embracing openness, it led to web browsers, Web3, and today’s AI revolution. 19th-century railroads started as fragmented private investments but later connected into a national network, transforming entire industries. Telecommunications evolved from isolated systems into shared infrastructure, paving the way for mobile networks and broadband connectivity. These weren’t just solutions to problems; they were infrastructural shifts that unlocked possibilities we hadn’t even imagined yet.

The internet wasn’t designed as a solution for digital commerce, media, or AI, yet by being open and decentralised, it enabled all of them to emerge and scale.

The question then is no longer, How do we solve this problem? But rather, how do we build an infrastructure where solutions emerge naturally?

This is the thinking that led to Beckn. Recognising that no single company, policymaker, or platform could fix mobility, commerce, or energy alone, we focused on building ecosystems, where collaboration replaces competition, where solutions are not imposed but enabled.

Much like nature itself, our inspiration came from forests, not walled gardens. In a forest, species grow together, sustaining one another without external control. In contrast, a walled garden depends on a gardener—trimming, pruning, and maintaining it to fit a controlled vision. One thrives through self-organisation, the other depends on external intervention. 

Consider Beckn Protocol as the next leap in this evolution. Just as HTTP standardised web communication and SMTP revolutionised email, Beckn creates the foundation for digital ecosystems that are open, equitable, and scalable. It integrates fragmented silos into unified networks, empowering participants to connect, transact, and innovate without friction. Much like the internet, telecommunications, or shared digital payments, Beckn is about enabling unforeseen solutions – what we call “happy accidents.”

By creating an open playground rather than a walled garden, Beckn allows multiple innovations to emerge, rather than forcing a single, optimised, and over-curated approach.

What Are Open Networks and Protocols?

Open networks facilitate free flow of information, goods, services – key in allowing diverse stakeholders to trust and align, taking what is scarce is making it abundant and opening up a space for collaborative solving. They are decentralised systems built on open protocols—shared rules and standards that enable different entities to work together without intermediaries. This reduces the friction of coordinating resources, actors and systems.

Think about climate change. It is not just a technological problem – it is a coordination problem. The world already has the technology to combat climate change: renewable energy, electric vehicles, carbon markets, and sustainable agriculture. Yet, despite these advancements, scientists warn that we are still on a perilous path toward 2+ degrees of warming. The problem? Fragmented data, siloed stakeholders, and inefficient resource allocation continue to stifle progress.

The numbers tell the story. $4.5 trillion per year – that’s the funding required by the early 2030s to stay on track with global climate goals (IEA Report). Climate action remains disorganised and inefficient, struggling with dispersed stakeholders, disaggregated resources, and lack of global-scale coordination.

A fragmented approach to climate action is too slow and too costly. But coordinated action can create exponential change, making local solutions globally scalable. Open networks can reduce information asymmetry, ensure trust, and minimise transaction frictions, unlocking the true potential of collective climate action.

This is already taking shape. The Open Climate Data Grid aims to serve as an interoperable data infrastructure, tracking climate risks, emissions, and environmental impact in real time. Decentralised climate financing can democratize access to green bonds and carbon credits, reducing inefficiencies in climate funding. Interoperable carbon markets can integrate seamlessly with regulatory infrastructure, ensuring accountability and trust. Beyond industrial decarbonisation, open networks are enabling nature-based solutions, like reforestation, regenerative agriculture, and biodiversity conservation, by creating sustainability-driven marketplaces. Additionally, Beckn is working on providing the trusted infrastructure to unlock interoperability across the energy ecosystem. The Digital Energy Grid (DEG), co-developed with the International Energy Agency, has already facilitated 4.3 million transactions and dispersed over 22 GWh of energy. It lowers costs, expands market access, and delivers measurable returns by aligning three critical flows: energy, trusted information, and capital. As with digital ID and payments in India, its power lies in making coordination infrastructure open and programmable, allowing anyone to build on top of it under neutral, multi-stakeholder governance that keeps markets open and competitive.

Through these advancements, open networks aren’t just supporting climate action; they are redefining how global ecosystems collaborate, adapt, and scale solutions in response to climate urgency.

This is the shift from solutions to infrastructure – from my app to our shared foundation.

A New Way of Doing New Things

As we stand at the crossroads of climate change, urbanisation, energy transition, and economic inclusivity, we must ask ourselves:

Are we willing to let go of our urge to create the perfect solution and instead nurture the conditions for an open, evolving ecosystem? Can we step back from the lone-hero mindset and allow networks, like nature itself, to find the way?

In the pursuit of solving the world’s greatest problems, perhaps the real challenge is not in finding the answer, but in letting the answer be co-created. After all, we don’t just need better solutions, we need better ways to orchestrate them.

Solve for coordination in your domain with Beckn.

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]]> Designing for Porosity to Drive Network Effects https://societalthinking.org/blog/designing-for-porosity-to-drive-network-effects/ Tue, 03 Dec 2024 08:57:13 +0000 https://societalthinking.org/?p=8600 Discover how Societal Thinking design principles can guide orchestrating porosity within networks to drive impactful collaborations and network effects. These principles enhance water safety and community health through strategic connections.

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What do a scientist from Bangalore, a water quality champion from Chikkaballapur, and a social change leader from Chinthamani have in common? At first glance, maybe not much – but in a district-level meeting with INREM, these individuals came together with a shared purpose: to tackle water safety and community health. Through networks that span diverse expertise and locations, each of them plays a role in orchestrating solutions that no one group could achieve alone.

Sunder Rajan, Executive Director INREM Foundation writes about how they apply some of the Societal Thinking design principles and more importantly, why INREM orchestrates these networks. Here’s what he had to say.

A chance conversation with a friend Bishwadeep Ghose, a few weeks back, came to an important point. What will help a group of organizations get going and work together in Assam on local water issues there? A word came out of that conversation – porosity – and what it means for networks.

Collaboration through connected networks has the potential to accelerate changemaking. The Metcalf law talks about n2 (square of n) connections that can be made in a network of n actors. The Reed law stretches this further to 2n (2 to the power of n) possible connections.

However, all this is possible, only if individuals or groups of individuals within the network are open to, are enabled to, and are able to discover others within the network. The layer of interface between actors needs to be porous so that the exchange of information can take place.

We call this property of one actor (or set of actors) to be able to exchange information with another actor (or set of actors) as ‘network porosity’.

Let us take the example of INREM’s work on securing Water-Safe Communities. A health worker spots a child malnourished and constantly getting sick. She refers the child to a doctor, who has a conversation with a local water engineer, concluding that water contamination is making the child sick and malnourished.

Here we have the ‘porosity’ between the doctor and the water engineer, making it possible to exchange information.

However, the current architecture of people’s networks is more siloed, and the connector across information streams is absent.

The question here is: How can porosity be enhanced and are there design principles which can help us?

Orchestrating Porosity: Design Principles

Strategically designed connections within existing information streams can unlock powerful network effects, enabling more impactful collaborations across sectors.

1. Reframe roles to build mutual trust

Collaboration across sectors often falters due to mistrust or misaligned narratives. Transforming these interactions requires reframing relationships so that actors recognise how their efforts complement one another, enabling trust and collaboration.

In the early stages of INREM’s work, we fell into communication patterns that ended up causing more friction between actors. For example, the doctor spoke up saying ‘Failure of the engineer to supply safe water is increasing my problem’. The engineer, on the other hand, said, ‘The doctor not detecting diseases is causing people to make no effort for safer water’. Local media just played on to amplify these perceptions, causing greater dissonance. 

We later started facilitating a cross-sector interaction between Water and Health with the communication that, ‘Water data can help doctors better target disease detection; Health workers can contribute to more focussed water supply’. This changed the perspective of both actors and seeing the value of cross-sector interaction.

2. Anchor collaboration on specific, localised goals

Networks thrive when actors are united by a common, actionable objective that is relevant to their local realities. These goals unlock latent value by enabling diverse stakeholders to contribute unique expertise.

District platforms designed by INREM intentionally bring together government and civil society actors, such as water, health, agriculture, and environmental conservationists, all with a common goal defined clearly and contextually. With a vision of locally achieving Water-Safe Communities, an incremental and first goal, is, for example, ‘How can we come together for Fluoride-free, safe water in Jhabua, MP, in 3 years?’. 

Porosity to Drive Network Effects

District platforms created by INREM serve as intentional spaces for collaboration, drawing in government and civil society actors – spanning water, health, agriculture, and environmental conservation – with a clearly defined, local goal. By aligning these diverse stakeholders around a common objective, such as locally achieving Water-Safe Communities, we can start with incremental targets like ‘Fluoride-free, safe water in Jhabua, MP, within 3 years.’ This kind of focused goal-setting reveals unique opportunities where one actor’s resources or expertise can directly support another’s needs.

Such a goal statement brings out specific opportunities that only one actor can offer and is potentially useful to another. For example, The Govt PHED Department in Jhabua, MP was not able to utilise their Field testing kits (FTK) for Water testing and get data. NGOs were looking out for some ways of testing data and informing their communities about water safety. They saw mutual complementary value, and a new porous membrane opened up that helped NGOs use PHED FTK kits and produce more data from the district. 

3. Balance intentional design with serendipity

At the scale of the network, not every porous membrane can be built up from scratch. By having some open-invite experiences, we make it possible to get unexpected connections. 

Wide interest and curated sessions within the iECHO platform on wider interest topics such as rainwater harvesting, or plastic in water, help to bring people together and potentially form random connections.

While softening up the walls, and bringing in some lighter see-through curtains, we sometimes encounter resistance. A recent example is that of a polluting industry and an affected village community. While there are potential wins for both sides that are visible to an external observer, existing local power dynamics made it difficult to induce any porosity here. 

Sustaining Network Effects through Porosity

Rituals are essential for building self-reinforcing interactions that sustain network effects over time. When held regularly, these gatherings create a continuum of engagement where relationships deepen, leading to greater porosity and enabling new connections across diverse actors. As networks evolve, these rituals cultivate an environment where unexpected collaborations naturally emerge. For example, several groups of actors are coming together in Chikaballapur, Karnataka,  now to engage closely with lakes receiving treated wastewater from Bengaluru, and helping to protect the health, ecosystems and livelihoods that revolve around them. 

Digital engagements support real-life relationships offering potential continuity during busier times, and being able to make connections, where none else is otherwise possible. Contexts are not just geographical, but they can also be about perspectives, and thereby ECHO sessions have helped to bring together and nurture relationships, with the ritual of mutually supporting problem-solving.

Fresh energy helps networks develop new nodes and increases the possibility of newer connections happening. One example of such orchestration is the quarterly online cohort of Water Quality Champions that we support, with a month-long course. This helps to bring in newer players, who keep revitalizing the network, as well as enhancing existing network nodes – geographical and thematic.

Apart from specific locally contextual porosity enhancement with district platforms, or with regional NGO networks such as Pravah in Gujarat that bind together naturally, we see value in pan-national or global relationships that get formed when cohorts of Water Quality Champions come in with fresh energy every 3 months. 

Let’s say, 5 cups of structured and contextual local rituals, 3 cups of thematic problem exploration & solving, and 1 cup of fresh new cohorts coming in; making a bowlful of a delicious and juicy porous network.

Some ideas here could help:

  1. Begin by mapping your actors and see the state of current network porosity
  2. What rituals could help actors see more value, and increase porosity?
  3. How can fresh energy infuse new nodes and more connections?

Keep track of your challenges because they will keep coming. Metcalf and Reed might be far away, but let us remember that each small connection made could push large levers making it possible to bring unexpected change.

Every pore matters!

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]]> Change sustains at a better equilibrium https://societalthinking.org/blog/change-sustains-at-a-better-equilibrium/ Thu, 01 Aug 2024 11:29:12 +0000 https://societalthinking.org/?p=8277 Here are 3 ingredients to solve the one problem to shift the paradigm from where it will be inefficient to go back so that change sustains.

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“A perfect, finished utopia isn’t possible,” an older cooperativista told me on the patio of a bar one sweaty night. “Utopia is an idea you work toward, and once you make the idea come true, it changes.” 

– Clement Gelly 

At the time I was born, women could vote, study, open bank accounts and travel by themselves. They could not, still, love and live with another woman, inherit property on par with their brothers or seek legal protection from domestic violence or sexual harassment at the workplace. Growing up with such duality was odd. I played cricket with the boys in my neighbourhood without worry but had to come home before nightfall. I went to parties where women huddled in the kitchen and men drank and smoked outside. I sat for the same exams as boys but if I scored more marks, teachers would make sure to tell everyone a girl did better. 

Over time, these oddities changed. The conversation on women’s rights expanded to include more than just (what we now think of as) basic rights. We spoke about safely navigating public spaces, especially at night, about accessing contraception without embarrassment, about discriminatory hostel regulations and what it meant to live in rape culture. Now, just a few years later, the landscape of women’s rights looks entirely different. We talk about embodiment, about the pleasures of loitering, about pronouns and sexualities and loving ourselves and each other freely and openly, about intersectionality and how it enables us to navigate the ‘ands’ in our identities. The paradigm is always shifting. 

What’s curious is how this shift happens. Policies, infrastructure, resources and habits and routines shape the status-quo, or paradigm, of society. Although this paradigm ensures we are in a stable state, it makes solving complex problems difficult. If we solve one or a few symptoms of such problems, the stable state stays the same and keeps change from sustaining. What we need to create lasting change is to solve the one problem that will shift the paradigm from where it will be inefficient to go back. 

I see 3 ingredients for bringing about such shifts so that change sustains: 

  • Intense desire for a new state of being: Women’s rights have been organised for, fought for and continue to be strived for because women want to bring about a world where they enjoy agency, dignity and choice. I’ve realised the closer this place is to where we currently are, the easier it is to visualise and work towards. While the idea of utopia is always changing, it’s more effective to create a +1 change that is easy to adopt for everyone rather than change everything for everyone all at once.

     

  • A new narrative: Rebecca Solnit says, “Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis. We are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing, or believing in, or acting on the possibilities for change.” Until we have a new narrative – a new story – new habits cannot be formed and sustained. What we need is a story where we, communities, are not just recipients of decision-making processes but are active co-creators of all decisions that affect our lives at an individual and collective level.

     

  • Accountability between samaaj (civil society) and sarkaar (government): Shifting to a better state needs both samaaj and sarkaar to come together. While samaaj can gain momentum with movements (think Besharmi Morcha and a wave of women speaking against the Bhanwari Devi judgement) that give voice to the marginalised, give visibility into what the people really want and lay out these demands for sarkaar, sarkaar is instrumental in ensuring change sustains by institutionalising it. Like in the the case of Besharmi Morcha contributing to The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 and Bhanwari Devi’s legal struggle paving the way for India’s The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act.

Although I am talking about India because that’s my lived experience of womanhood, the paradigm is shifting everywhere. From women not being able to vote in the 18th Century to women serving as Heads of State in 27 countries, from women not being allowed to study until the 19th Century to nearly 5.9 Mn women being educators, from women not having bank accounts until mid 20th Century to 74% of women enjoying financial inclusion! As samaaj, we don’t just exist in a socio-cultural environment, we actively shape it. Enabling change that sustains needs us to reimagine and move towards a new paradigm, ceaselessly. A perfect, finished utopia may not be possible, but slowly and irrevocably moving towards a better equilibrium is. 

These ideas are drawn from the book, ‘Think Sustain’. Read, download and share your Creative Commons copy here.

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]]> Unified Not Uniform: Designing to Solve at Scale https://societalthinking.org/blog/unified-not-uniform-designing-to-solve-at-scale/ Fri, 05 Jul 2024 08:54:43 +0000 https://societalthinking.org/?p=8236 Read how the unified not uniform principle embraces diversity & leverages the unique strengths of participants to drive scalable solutions.

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I recently finished watching Ted Lasso, a popular and widely loved show on Apple+ TV, about a successful college football coach in the US who moves to the UK for a head coaching job for a struggling English Premier League soccer team. In one memorable episode, Ted – the show’s protagonist – realises that his traditional coaching methods aren’t resonating with his diverse football team. Instead of sticking to a rigid playbook, he needs to tailor his approach to each player’s unique strengths and backgrounds. For example, Ted recognises that Dani Rojas thrives on positivity and enthusiasm, while Roy Kent needs a more direct and tough-love approach. By embracing this strategy, Ted fosters a cohesive team where each member can excel in their way.

I’ll return to why I’m telling you about Ted Lasso in a little bit (no spoilers, I promise). For now, let’s think about why it’s so important to keep in mind the different needs and strengths of every player, and why involving them as participants instead of just giving them instructions from the side of the field is what makes all the difference. I’ve been at Societal Thinking for nearly a year now. In all the work I’ve done on Climate, I’ve realised it’s these two factors that make or break a solution.

Just as Ted Lasso learns to adapt his coaching methods to suit the unique strengths of each player, at Kuza, the approach to empowering agripreneurs is also individualised. Kuza is a social enterprise based in Nairobi, Kenya, dedicated to transforming agriculture in rural communities by providing smallholder farmers with training, tools and resources to adopt local sustainable and regenerative agricultural practices.

Kuza faces the challenge of diverse agricultural landscapes and the varying needs of farmers across different regions. They support this diversity not by having a uniform solution, but rather by a unified, adaptable framework that can be modified to various contexts. This approach allows Kuza to solve at scale, effectively by maintaining core principles of sustainable and regenerative agriculture while adapting specific practices to fit local conditions. By embracing diversity within a unified framework, Kuza ensures that each community can thrive, ultimately driving exponential change across varied agricultural settings.

What is Unified not uniform

Unified not uniform is more than a design principle; it’s a worldview. It encourages us to look at solutions not through a single lens but from multiple perspectives. This principle challenges the conventional approach where a single entity, often a government or a large organisation, drives the design, governance, and implementation of solutions. Instead, it promotes collaboration and innovation across different sectors, including civil society, private enterprises and governmental bodies.

Just as Ted adapts his coaching style to fit the needs of each player, we need to move from replicating the same solutions to a unified not uniform design philosophy. This approach requires a shift towards valuing and leveraging diversity as an asset rather than viewing it as an obstacle to standardisation.

An excellent analogy to understand unified not uniform is comparing a farm to a forest. A farm represents uniformity, where each plant is cultivated in a controlled manner. In contrast, a forest is a natural ecosystem where diverse species coexist, each playing a unique role. The farm works well in small, controlled environments producing one kind of food. But, the forest thrives on its diversity and interconnectedness, much like the Societal Thinking way of solving. This diversity and interconnectedness make the system resilient, adaptable, and capable of evolving over time

By providing a common framework, Beckn allows for different ecosystem actors – service providers, consumers, and developers – to connect and interact while maintaining their unique offerings and specialities.  Beckn’s Unified Energy Interface (UEI) exemplifies the Unified not uniform approach by connecting diverse energy service providers within a shared, interoperable framework. UEI allows various participants like EV charging stations, renewable energy providers, and smart grid technologies to integrate seamlessly into a cohesive energy ecosystem while preserving their unique offerings, allowing each provider to contribute their specialised strengths and solutions. For instance, an EV charging network can optimise charging times based on renewable energy availability, enhancing consumer experience. This diversity fosters collaborative innovation, where each new participant adds value, ensuring solutions are adaptable, scalable, and resilient. By leveraging the unique strengths of each contributor, Beckn enables accelerating the adoption of sustainable energy practices.

All social problems are complex and diverse. Addressing them at scale isn’t about replicating what works in one context to another because the contexts vary greatly. Whether it’s the heartfelt journey of Ted Lasso, the impactful work of ONEST or taking on an open network approach to reshaping inclusivity, the takeaway is: that a unified not uniform” approach is key to enabling diversity at scale. This Societal Thinking approach celebrates diversity, turning it into a powerful asset rather than a challenge. It encourages us to see beyond one-size-fits-all solutions and recognise the unique contributions each participant can bring.

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]]> Restoring the agency of mothers for quality Respectful Maternity Care https://societalthinking.org/blog/restoring-the-agency-of-mothers-for-quality-respectful-maternity-care/ Mon, 27 May 2024 10:49:21 +0000 https://societalthinking.org/?p=7531 Read how Aastrika Foundation is restoring the agency of mothers and building the capacity of midwives for respectable maternal care.

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“Imagine a woman in labour comes to a government hospital for childbirth. She is lying on a bed, in pain, half-naked alongside other women. There are healthcare professionals around her. She is slapped, pinched, and shouted at for expressing her pain.” – Anoushaka Chandrashekar, Manager – Advocacy, Aastrika Foundation.

Never have I ever imagined that behind the genuine smile of a mother during childbirth could lie a horrifying experience. My understanding of maternity care was challenged when I spoke to Anoushaka as I was preparing to host her at our Global Ecosystem Meetup earlier this year.

She painted a grim picture when she talked about how the lack of quality and respect can manifest in labour rooms across India:

“In private ‘high-end’ hospitals, the abuse can manifest in the form of inductions and episiotomies, which are conducted on women without any evidence, explanation or informed consent.

In labour rooms across India, a lot of power dynamics play out, especially to do with generations of disempowerment, lack of agency, and lack of choice.

As per a research study conducted in India, the rate of disrespect and abuse towards labouring women was 71%. As per another study conducted in India, the rate of episiotomies for first-time mothers was found to be 85%, even though WHO recommends not using routine episiotomies.”

Anoushaka also let me in on the insight that Dr Janhavi Nilekani’s (Founder and Chairperson, Aastrika Foundation) own maternity care experience (lack of evidence-based care) was the basis for setting up Aastrika Foundation. This organisation works towards transforming the birthing experience of women into a joyful and respectful one. It piqued my interest to deeply understand the work Aastrika does, taking me to Vani Vilas Hospital where Anoushaka showed me around the midwifery unit and Aastrika’s work in action.

Here are glimpses of our conversations from the showcase to delve into what Aastrika does and how.

Restoring the agency of mothers for quality respectable maternal careQ: Could you tell us the problem Aastrika Foundation is tackling?

The maternal health landscape in India is plagued with both “Too Little, Too Late” and “Too Much, Too Soon”.

The former means that in the pockets of the country, women are unable to receive the required care at the right time. This typically leads to mortality and is reflected in the high maternal and infant mortality rates. On the other hand, “Too Much, Too Soon” is when interventions that are not evidence-based are administered to women during pregnancy and childbirth.

For instance, the rates of augmentations, inductions, and episiotomies are very high in India. More than 85% of first-time mothers in India undergo an episiotomy even though WHO recommends against the routine use of episiotomies. Similarly, the C-section rates in several parts of the country are extremely high – the India-wide private sector C-section rate is 47.4% and states like Telangana, West Bengal, and J&K have C-section rates of more than 80% in the private sector.

To put things in perspective, WHO says that 85% of women can have a physiologic or vaginal birth. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, Disrespect and Abuse of women during labour and childbirth are very common.

In terms of mortality rates, in India, while the maternal mortality rate is 97 per 100,00 live births, the neonatal, infant and under-five mortality rates are 24.9, 35.2 and 41.9 per 1000 live births respectively.

Aastrika works on strengthening the health system to offer a better birthing experience to women. We do this through the capacity building of healthcare professionals, supporting professional midwifery and creating demand for high-quality care. We want everyone to realise pregnancy and childbirth are physiological processes and not diseases.

​​Q: Are there any easy-to-implement simple steps we as a society can take to transform maternal care?

The maternal health system in India is complex, involving several stakeholders. One thing that I personally feel can be an easy starting point is – communication. Communicate to the woman, ask her how she is feeling, tell her about what is happening with her, tell her how she may feel at a certain stage of pregnancy or labour, and assure her that it is okay to experience certain pains or emotions. I feel open communication also helps counter our own biases and truly cater to the needs of the woman.

Q: How does Aastrika Foundation enable maternity care and the birthing experience to be safe and respectful?

Aastrika Foundation has three key objectives:

  • Capacity building and health system strengthening 
  • Establishing a cadre of professional midwives 
  • Creating demand for high-quality care among governments, policymakers, and society

In terms of initiatives, we have Aastrika Sphere, our capacity-building initiative.

Aastrika Foundation also works in collaboration with the Department of Health, Government of Karnataka, to implement the professional midwifery training programme in the state of Karnataka. The Government of India launched the Nurse Practitioners in Midwifery (NPM) Program in 2018 to establish a cadre of professional midwives. This program adopts a cascade training model, where International Midwifery Educators train nurses to become midwifery educators at the National Midwifery Training Institutes. These midwifery educators establish the State Midwifery Training Institutes, where they train the midwives. These midwives will practice at Midwifery-Led Care Units at high caseload facilities in government hospitals. We currently have an NMTI in Vanivilas Hospital in Bengaluru, the largest mother and child hospital in Karnataka. We recently started the SMTI in Cheluvamba Hospital in Mysore.

Another initiative of Aastrika Foundation is advocacy, which cuts across all the other initiatives. We work on creating awareness about professional midwifery, the need for capacity building for healthcare professionals, the rights of childbearing women and the like.

We also have Aastrika Midwifery Centre, a birth centre located in South Bangalore. It is a centre for excellence and is meant to showcase the best practices in the private sector. AMC has an interdisciplinary team of midwives, doctors, and nurses, who work in collaboration to provide the best possible care for women and their newborns. The centre is designed to have a non-hospital vibe with ample space to ambulate, birth companions are encouraged, birth tools are provided to help women change positions during labour and childbirth, and women are encouraged to be part of the decisions around pregnancy, labour, and birthing.

Q: What is the relation between Aastrika Foundation and Societal Thinking?

As mentioned earlier, one of our key initiatives is a digital capacity-building platform – Aastrika Sphere – based on the Societal Thinking approach. This Societal Platform uses the Sunbird architecture and hence is free to use for everyone, and is designed for scale. 

It is a collaborative platform with content from eminent public health organisations such as White Ribbon Alliance India, Maternity Foundation, Jphiego, and Fernandez Foundation. In addition to the digital platform, we have expanded Aastrika Sphere to include in-person training programmes on various topics like Respectful Maternity Care and alternative birthing positions.

Our Respectful Maternity Care training programmes in particular are meant for several stakeholders within the healthcare system. We have provided this training to doctors, nurses, security personnel, helpers, receptionists, pharmacists, and others. This ensures that the capacity to provide Respectful Maternity Care goes beyond the clinical healthcare personnel, and the woman has an overall positive experience. Thus, Aastrika Foundation distributes the ability to solve by building the capacity at various levels within the healthcare system.

Q: How can we create irreversible change in the ecosystem by enhancing the capacity of the healthcare system, thereby restoring the agency of women on a larger scale?

Our focus has been on strengthening the supply side of health systems through capacity building of the workforce and supporting the introduction of a new cadre. In future, we want to build the demand side and create awareness among women and families to demand for better care through advocacy. We believe one of the key reasons for poor quality maternal care is the lack of demand for high-quality care. Building the demand side will put pressure on the health system to deliver high-quality maternal care. Eventually, this demand will ensure the sustenance of the supply and they will feed into each other. Women and families will demand evidence-based care and the healthcare system will ensure that their workforce is kept up to date with continuous capacity building.

This conversation and my visit to the Vani Vilas Hospital made me realise two things:

  • With simple mindset shifts, many aspects of maternity care can be reimagined and put into action like changing the name of the Delivery Room to the Birthing Room, creating a home-like environment that is familiar, comfortable and safe, allowing a birthing partner during delivery, helping mothers to inculcate a positive mindset, thus creating a narrative around childbirth that is respectful.

  • Building the capacity of professional midwives is crucial to achieve this. By teaching mothers the concept of consent, educating them about the choices they can make, and helping them be aware of what’s right and wrong, thus unlocking their agency, the midwives can make the process of childbirth a dignified one. The Aastrika Sphere, a great manifestation of a Societal Platform, can help build this capacity.

Read more about Societal Platforms here.

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]]> Civis – Enabling citizens to become active participants in democratic systems https://societalthinking.org/blog/civis-enabling-citizens-to-become-active-participants-in-democratic-systems/ Wed, 28 Feb 2024 09:30:20 +0000 https://societalthinking.org/blog// Read about the journey of Civis, their reimaginations and shifts, adopting a citizen-centric approach and what's next for the organisation.

The post Civis – Enabling citizens to become active participants in democratic systems appeared first on Societal Thinking.

]]> I live in Bangalore, the city of traffic and lakes – frequently known to cause long delays and spontaneously catch on fire, respectively though not exclusively. Like most of us, I share my woes on social media, finding a community of Bangalore dwellers who are asking the same question as me – What can I do?

Despite India being the largest democracy in the world, it is confusing for citizens like me to understand and be a part of decision-making processes, especially around issues that affect our everyday lives. The question ‘What can I do?’ is as often resignation to the state of affairs, just as it is an urge to take action, to participate. It is exactly this dilemma that Antaraa Vasudev is trying to address. 

I first met Antaraa in early 2023. Over breakfast, she recounted wondering what it takes to build a bridge between citizens and governments as one of her “big curiosities”. She had worked closely with DemocracyOS in Argentina and France and was rooted in the landscape of democratic movements and technology for good. Antaraa’s curiosity eventually led her to leave her full-time job and set up Civis in 2018 – a community-driven non-profit aimed at increasing citizen participation in the lawmaking process.

Recently, I caught up with Antaraa again, this time delving deeper into what Civis does and how it all began. Here are a few snippets from our conversation.

What was your reimagination of democratic systems?

While working closely with democratic movements in Argentina and France, I realised driving constructive dialogue between citizens and governments is vital to reinforcing trust in democratic systems. I remember in the 2010s, we’d all started using social media as a window to the world – both to see what was going on in the social, political, economic and cultural lives of others and give them a glimpse into ours. It made me wonder how we could use this new tool – not just social media but technology at large – to foster generative conversation between citizens and governments. Could technology enable citizens to participate meaningfully in democratic systems? Could citizens and governments – two actors that should have far more opportunities to talk – meet one another halfway? Could we collectively usher in a new wave of democracy? 

I think it’s a superpower we have, as citizens, to have a voice and have it be heard and, for the longest time, we’ve not been fully aware of the right time or platform for us to air our thoughts and concerns. I remember seeing a call for feedback once in a tiny corner of the newspaper and once, hearing about a consultation from a friend. Let’s suppose I could see these calls for feedback for every legislative document, what are the odds I’d be able to decipher the legalese and understand what was being changed and why? Even if I were a super citizen who looks at all these documents, understands them and formulates feedback, I run into barriers in giving this feedback to the government using the few channels they have. Now, let’s assume I managed to submit my feedback as well – I wouldn’t know what comes of the effort I’ve put in. Was it read? Was it incorporated? If not, why? It’s not just laborious as a process, but also erodes citizen trust.

How did you (try to) answer these questions with Civis? 

Citizens can participate in democratic systems in many ways, from filing an RTI to attending a protest. For me, the biggest gap that emerged was in the legislative process. The fact that laws were being made for 1.3 billion citizens with the feedback of only a few didn’t sit well with me. These laws define how our daily lives look, and how our futures will look. While earlier, avenues to engage a lot of people in the legislative process were limited, technology offered many new possibilities.

In 2018, just as I had set up Civis, the Bangalore Master Plan had come out for public feedback, led by Janaagraha. They were kind enough to involve us. We ran a small campaign – a couple of radio ads – and somehow managed to get about 1,800 comments on the consultation! It was an AHA! moment for me. It showed me that people really did want to be active participants in decision-making processes and set the tone for how Civis took shape.

Hereon, what were the shifts in your journey? 

Working on the Bangalore Master Plan made it clear that it isn’t just one law at a time but a range of laws – around, say, IT policy or the environment or disability justice – that inform people’s lived experience. 

We shifted from thinking about public feedback from a campaign point of view to a system optimisation point of view. In 2014, a policy recommendation was issued for all Ministries and Departments to gather public feedback on draft laws and policies. So, while lawmakers wanted to reach out to the public, there weren’t many ways for them to do so effectively. Running campaigns for a couple of draft laws and policies wouldn’t enable citizens to engage with them at the scale required. It is only when we surface all of these hundreds of draft laws and policies that are open for public feedback and in ways that are accessible for citizens that we truly tap into the power of democratic decision-making.

How did you work towards making this process citizen-centric? 

We drew inspiration from the way we live our lives now – at the click of a button. Click a button and a car shows up or a week’s worth of groceries get delivered. Could being a part of the democratic process be made as simple?

It was around this time that I met Sanjay and got introduced to Societal Thinking. He told me the DIKSHA story – how they are able to track the pulse of the Indian education system – and it soon became the blueprint for what I wanted to do at Civis. 

The more I understood how to design for scale, for agency, the more I started thinking about the platform approach. I envisioned it as a space where all draft laws and policies could be accessed by citizens. As we built on this idea, we moved beyond just aggregating these documents and brought in lawyers to help simplify the legalese. Then, we reached out to concerned communities to participate. The idea was to include the voices of people who would be directly affected by the laws, not just netizens. 

In the early days, we visited Mumbai’s Constituency 102 to gather feedback for the Corporator. We went door to door, meeting people and asking for feedback that would be useful for the corporator. A strange thing happened – people who were homeowners openly shared their feedback but tenants were reluctant. It made us realise people who felt a sense of security in their neighbourhood and livelihoods were more trusting of us and by extension, of government processes and services. It reaffirmed the need to design for trust on our platform and to ongoingly build trust offline as well. At the same time, I believe trust isn’t something you can design for in a one-off way. From our side, we make sure we are true to the feedback people give, transparent and work towards restoring the agency of both citizens and government officials in whatever way we can. 

We wanted to design for trust as well, for both citizens and the government. We connected with community organisations to create reports and analysis to help the government make sense of the feedback citizens have given. On the other side, we embedded signals to the feedback on the platform that would give us telemetric data around if the feedback has been viewed and when, for us to close the loop for citizens.

As citizens, we often consider government processes to be time-consuming and tedious. Since you work so closely with these processes, what has your experience been like? 

I think my biggest moments of optimism in our work come from seeing and meeting people involved in these processes. It’s unfortunate that as citizens, we don’t get many opportunities to do so. For example, in 2023, there was a disability rights consultation that came out for people with disabilities. For this legislation, the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment made sure the entire document, which is over 100 pages long, was rendered in Sign Language. They even made videos in Sign Language for each chapter, printed these chapters in Braille and so on. 

Even in consultations, sometimes about 72% of feedback gets accepted – a number that really surprises people. I am grateful I’ve had the chance to meet heroes in the system at every level. I recall meeting an officer from the B.M.C. Pest Control Department who used to travel 3 hours to come to work every day and still made time to sit with me. Their rigour is inspiring. 

I wish we could celebrate these stories more.

Finally, where is Civis now and what’s next? 

Currently, we have engaged 23,000+ citizens in 710+ cities and towns pan-India and have received 33700+ responses through our various means of outreach. 

In the next few years, we’re trying to unlock working at societal scale – with the platform, with our programmes that include handbooks and courses. We’re also looking to work more deeply with communities and at the grassroots level. 

We want to establish best practices in consultation, by demonstrating the advantages of community participation in lawmaking – for good governance. Working towards institutionalisation of consultative norms for policy making, and creating established channels for engaging CSOs; analysing data and using a scalable technology-driven approach for public consultations. Civis is working towards reaching 1 million citizens by 2030.

Read about more Societal Platforms here.

References:

  1. https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/bengaluru-news/shocking-visuals-of-bengaluru-traffic-holdup-on-orr-commuters-stuck-for-hours-ahead-of-long-weekend-101695872609607.html
  2. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/bangalore-india-lake-bellandur-catches-fire-pollution
  3. https://www.freepressjournal.in/india/bengaluru-electric-car-catches-fire-in-middle-of-the-road-in-jp-nagar-horrific-visuals-surface

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