Response to COVID-19: International Education Campaign (2020)

UNU-MERIT Blog

How a home-grown social innovation sought to contribute to COVID-19 containment

A human-networked education campaign as a crisis response

By Shyama V. Ramani

There is an English saying: “Necessity is the mother of invention”, but this is incorrect in the sense that it is incomplete. Necessity is also often the mother of innovation, which is not the same as invention, as Schumpeter pointed out. Invention is something new, whereas innovation is a novelty which generates profit. Moreover, necessity is usually the mother and father of a social innovation that generates value for a community. Here’s our tale of how we made one.

In early March, strangely I got the same demand from my international students at Maastricht and from my FIN NGO team (mostly home-schooled) in an isolated coastal village in India: “What’s all this with the Corona? Why should we practice social distancing?” The number of queries made it evident that there was a near universal confusion. So the question was: should we do something or not?

Maria Tomai felt we should: “Imagine you see two motorcyclists bang into each other – first you have to signal the accident, second, you have to make sure that the injured do not move and nobody else bangs into them, i.e. you have to protect everybody; and finally, you have to change the system so that there are fewer accidents in the first place. The Coronavirus is like that. It’s been signaled, but we now have to deal with those who are sick and ensure more don’t get sick. We must act.” And thus, our team comprising Rita Bakunda, Jairaj Gopalkrishnan, Anurag Kanaujia, Maria Tomai and myself – wrote out a simple note on the need to flatten the curve of the pandemic. Let’s call this version 1 of our social innovation! An information blip!

Then the same thing happened again! From the fishing village and Maastricht – I heard: “Madam/Professor Ramani – but nobody seems to care!”. Another phenomenon noted by innovation scholars had been demonstrated. You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink! Science, Technology and Innovation – might provide great solutions, but unless you can gain Engagement for people to use and apply them, they might be a total flop, even if people need the stuff. That’s the raison d’être of SITE4Society too and it was staring at us in the face. So we had to get to work. How were we to make an engaging campaign – an effective social innovation?

First, we built the content. Anurag insisted, “In this post-truth world, our campaign should be based on research, scientific evidence and the rational expectations emerging from these.” We agreed. Howard, UNU-MERIT Head of Communications had just shattered our delusionary bliss about the return of dolphins to Venice, a fake news item, I had shared with all my students (!). “But a campaign should give us hope also – this pandemic is aggravating stress, depression and loneliness” pointed out Raja, our NGO senior advisor. We put in all this and still it was boring. We needed colour and figures to make it engaging, but when I looked up the internet there were no free clipart that resembled people from developing countries, especially from India and Africa. How were we to do create this?

Now when a firm does not have the knowledge to create an innovation component, it looks to external sources, even the international market to acquire it. This is especially how emerging country firms caught up during the last 50 years in terms of technological capabilities. Likewise, I reached out to Abhishek Mitra from the Kerala State Institute of Design, which I had visited as part of Cat Chain Project of UNU-MERIT.

So, Abhishek worked and got back to me: “Madam, you are right, I also could not find appropriate open-source clipart and so I have made them myself.” They were brilliant. Abhishek had  re-engineered an innovation from Humaaans, an open source site and was going to make his work also open-source. “Let me teach the program to you and you can adapt them any way you want to your campaign”, he offered. Fair enough, but knowledge is useless unless you have absorptive capabilities for learning, and I knew I didn’t have them! So, I pushed our interns Rita and Jay, Bachelors students of Maastricht University, interning at SITE4Society,  to learn the program and they did! Again, through team work, honest feedback loops and trust, an excellent education campaign was created – our social innovation!

Next step was localisation (i.e. translating and adapting our content to engage specific audience groups) and building a delivery platform, both very important for innovation diffusion. It is well known that for the diffusion of product innovations, social capital and networks can be key. We mobilized all our linguistic capabilities as well as networks in SITE4Society and FIN to adapt and replicate the education campaign in 15 other languages.

The number of native speakers is a rough estimation adopted from Wikipedia pages for the respective languages.

Finally, was it worth it? In terms of cost, we estimate that between the core team and all the volunteers, around 300 to 500 hours of work must have been invested. Benefits were at multiple levels, of different nature and over different geographies.

We all got a warm glow that comes from having done a good thing and with like-minded people. Rita was most poignant: “I have been told so many times that knowledge empowers. I never understood what that meant till now! By participating in this campaign, I have learnt about so much about pandemics, to go back to writing in my mother tongue (Kinyarwanda) and to explain the logic of social distancing to others so that they too can teach it. This is power!”.

Most volunteers shared it with their networks and so it trickled out to many regions as well as schools and universities there. Finally, in the FIN village it was printed and shared and read. Indeed, when 9 young people working or studying in the Netherlands, UK, Thailand, Hong Kong, Dubai and Malaysia returned home to the village, and were quarantined, our ladies were able to explain why and get them to respect social distancing. Then they began asking us questions such as: “How can we make a mask?”. Jairaj did the research, identified what seemed like a good model to build in resource scarce conditions, and now in Kameswaram village, with the help of the local government, masks are being produced and distributed freely to those below the poverty line and for 1.2 cents to others.

Yes, economists have pointed out that the drive to generate warm-glow may be founded in diverse ulterior motives, but I think this initiative was a spontaneous one to help address a humanitarian crisis in a war against viruses, by developing a human networked information system! And, yes, it was definitely worth it.

References

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