Let me set the context first. I am new to this sector which people call the \"Development\" sector. I wonder how and why this name came about. Makes me feel as if other sectors are \"Non-development\" sectors — that is definitely not true. The other sectors, at least the majority of them, have definitely contributed to the development (whatever one's interpretation of the word \"development\" may be). I am very sure of that. But that is a debate for some other day (some other blog).
\nSo coming back to me being new to this sector. Yes, that's true. It's not even a month since I joined Samanvay. But what a ride it has been in the last few weeks. I visited Gadlur Adivasi Hospital (Ashwini) where I accompanied the field workers in tribal villages and saw the kind of impact solutions like Avni have been creating on the ground for the last 10 years. Also visited Astitva to understand their concerns in adopting our solution. Met the One-All team at their office to understand the kind of good work they are doing using Frisbee as a sport among the kids coming from marginalised sections of our society.
\nLast but not least, I got a rare opportunity that I had not expected at least in the first month of joining. I was in the basement of one of the architectural marvels (QLO). The area is called the Maker's Garage — where one is supposed to tinker with stuff and create something. And we were supposed to do exactly that — tinker with our brains together and see what we could create for the sector that we are catering to.
\nIt started with quick introductions of the participants (Pacta, Civic Data Labs, Tattle, Samanvay, T4D, BeCause, Tamuku). The introduction itself blew my mind. I had never imagined the kind of work that was already being done by these players in this sector. Every player had a unique problem to solve in the ecosystem. Finding the right problems itself is not an easy task. But everyone somehow got it right. And to my amazement, everyone had some working solution (although at different levels of maturity).
\nTwo things that I found common:
\nWe started off discussing our most pressing challenges. There were quite a few interesting anecdotes that helped us understand the breadth of these challenges. There were cases where NGOs did not even know that there would be an organisation like Pacta that caters specifically to the legal problems unique to this sector. While some organisations like Samanvay and Civic Data Labs expressed the need for bandwidth (for competing priorities) and capability to be on top of relevant emerging technologies, Tattle seemed to have solved it with support from a mix of part-timers and full-timers. While some of us were struggling to grow our user-bases, Tamuku already has built a very wide network of NGOs through multiple channels (WhatsApp alerts, AIForNGOs platform, job-postings and fund-raising workshops) — although the use-case and the context is different for each of us.
\nSome of the most common open-challenges that emerged were:
\nHaving agreed on our common challenges and gained insights from each other, we went straight into discussing what each of us could do to solve these challenges. Several options emerged, and that formed the base of what we were going to do the next day — be specific about what we wanted to achieve and the support we would need to execute it.
\nDay 2 went straight from breakfast into business. Each team presented (time-bound) their To-Dos and their Asks. Q&A post the presentation brought further clarity. And yes, we were getting scored too, by every other participant in the room. So it was both — Collaboration and Competition 🙂.
\nWe all agreed to wait for the final outcomes on who will get how much and for what (no other choice there 🙂).
\nPost lunch, we got our brains together again on — Cohorts. We initially had different interpretations of it, and while we all were right about the possibilities for cohorts, we soon got aligned — thanks to Himesh who walked us through what cohorts were like from his experience of 3 cohorts in the past. The intent was to see if at least some of us could come together and try to solve a common problem together rather than doing it individually.
\nAgain, everyone floated ideas and we discussed those. But we felt that we needed to spend some more time on it thinking, and then reach out based on what we would like to work on together.
\nAnd we had a group photograph towards the end!! All Smiles!!
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