What is your project or your work about?
These Hands GSSE is a global for-profit Social Enterprise based in Botswana and New Zealand that trains, empowers, and supports a network of grassroots community innovators staying in rural communities, indigenous people communities, and humanitarian communities (e.g. refugee camps) of developing and developed countries through a bottom up co-creative design process approach and an Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) based social network platform.
What made you start this project and how did Falling Walls Engage, and its community contribute to the further development of your project?
The international development and community development sectors traditionally use a top-down and one-size fits all approach for their community empowerment and technological development interventions, which fail to leverage the local and indigenous knowledge of the people living within the rural communities, indigenous people communities, and humanitarian communities (e.g. refugee camps) they are working with and has resulted in many failed intervention projects, aid dependency, and a digital divide for people in these communities.
There are numerous creative, intelligent, and hard-working people residing there, but development in rural areas and for these communities is significantly slower than in more urban areas of the same nation and other parts of the world.
These Hands GSSE was founded in 2013 with the shared belief and understanding that community empowerment is not about the 1 billion mouths that we have to feed, but the 2 billion hands that are ready to engage and make a difference in their own lives.
Our core focus is to bridge the socio-economic inequalities in these grassroots communities by working with the local people, locally available skills, indigenous knowledge systems, raw materials, tools and reusing or repurposing all waste and natural resources within their communities and supporting them to address their own community livelihood challenges through appropriate technology or product solutions that they can develop into community businesses for better livelihood and community development outcomes.
We organize Skills Builder Training Workshops to teach participants how to make low-cost, useful technologies, run Creative Capacity Building Training Workshops for communities facing shared livelihood challenges, and organize or host International Development Design Summits (IDDS) that bring together diverse participants to co-create appropriate technologies and ventures with local communities.
Our other core focus is bridging the digital divide for these grassroots communities by enabling them to connect to our pre and post training support services and communicate with other like minded people that can support their projects to grow (exchange of information and ideas) without requiring the internet.
In 2019, our International Development Innovation Network (IDIN) SADC Consortium Project, co-founded by These Hands GSSE based in Botswana (also serving as regional secretariat) with the Kafue Innovation Center based in Zambia and Twende Social Innovation Center based in Tanzania and funded by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland and the Letshego Africa Group earned us recognition as one of the Falling Walls Foundation’s Top 50 Finalists under their Global Competition’s Science and Innovation Management Category in 2020.
In 2022, the same IDIN SADC Consortium project was recognized and awarded as one of the Falling Walls Foundation’s Top 20 Winners under their Global Competition’s Science Engagement Category.
The 2020 prestigious Falling Walls Top 50 finalist recognition validated our approach as a budding Science and Innovation Management approach and bolstered our credibility in being considered and awarded the New Zealand Government’s prestigious Edmund Hillary Fellowship in 2020.
The 2022 prestigious Falling Walls Engage Top 20 winner recognition validated our approach even more as a world leading Science Engagement and grassroots community development approach. Pitching our approach and impact on the Falling Walls Engage stage in 2022, gave us an opportunity and audience to showcase our solution to various international development sector players and show them how it works, how scalable and replicable it is, how sustainable it is and how they can engage with it or with us when designing and implementing their community empowerment and technological development interventions.
Being given a chance to serve as one of the 2023 Falling Wallings Foundation’s Advisory Board members for their Science Engagement Category, grew my profile as a young and upcoming leader in the Science Engagement Field.