Green Rural Economy

This consortium-led initiative enables development practitioners find the information they need and act upon it. We curate and present knowledge in usable formats and facilitate spaces for collaboration to drive sustainable change across rural India.

We are building a platform that allows users to access knowledge and find support. It includes:

Playbooks

Curated knowledge from leading experts and organisations to provide a unified view of solutions towards green rural economies. These guides have to be user-centric and actionable.

Directories

A network of vetted trainers, service providers and changemakers. Access to experts can reduce barriers and close the loop from learning to action.

Forums

Spaces that connect knowledge seekers with experts to facilitate exchange of ideas and promote collaboration. This will help break out of siloed approaches.

To begin with, we are focusing on these three methods of knowledge dissemination. We are currently working closely with partner organisations to understand the problems they face with finding and sharing information.

We will use these insights to inform the development of the platform.

Knowledge sharing: WELL Labs researchers discuss with Community Resource Persons in Lohardaga village in Jharkhand to understand how they access and share knowledge.

Why a platform for knowledge discovery?

Rural India faces economic distress and loss of livelihoods. As land degrades, crop yield falls and income stagnates, farmers are forced to migrate to cities in search of work.

These are complex problems that require systemic change. Our starting point is that opening up knowledge is a vital step to empower rural communities. This is more so because climate change has pushed us into new territory where traditional knowledge needs to be integrated with better data.

There are people and organisations doing important work but these are largely limited to isolated cases. We need to address the barriers that prevent these innovations from diffusing rapidly across geographies and contexts.

We identified four reasons why knowledge fails to translate to impact at scale:

Missing Context

Knowledge is not tailored to the end user’s context, making it difficult for them take action based on specific needs.

We need content that is designed for users.

Undocumented Knowledge

There is a lot of tacit knowledge with local practitioners, experts and organisations.

We need systems to capture and disseminate information.

Lack of Support Systems

Knowledge cannot translate to action without human interaction or handholding.

We need systems that allow users to access support easily.

Siloed Approaches

Fragmented understanding often results in duplication or unintended consequences.

We need spaces for knowledge exchange and collaboration.

To implement the Green Rural Economy platform, our consortium follows three fundamental principles:

The user is central.

It is messy, iterative (and exciting), but a cornerstone of our product development process is understanding our users’ needs, how they adapt, what they aspire for, and building with them in mind.

Know what to measure.

We are firm believers of learning through experimentation, which may take time. Defining our hypotheses allows us to map our findings and work in a structured way.

Co-creation with partners.

We want to work efficiently and at scale. Designing the platform together allows us to combine our strengths, learn from each other and amplify our impact.

Partners

Steering Committee

Ashish Goel

Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Urban Ladder

Manu Srivastava

Chief Operating Officer

Arghyam

Smita Kumar

GRE Lead

WELL Labs

Dhruvi Shah

Executive Trustee and Chief Executive Officer

Axis Bank Foundation

Ravindra A

Director

Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN)

Suryakumar PVS

Former Deputy Managing Director

NABARD

Dibyendu Chaudhuri

Research and Advocacy

Professional Assistance for Development Action (PRADAN)

Sameer Shisodia

Chief Executive Officer

Rainmatter Foundation

Veena Srinivasan

Founder and Executive Director