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  • Writer's pictureIsabella Maina

How did these thoughts influence how I thought about development


Greater links between bottom up and top down development agenda

A frequent phenomenon in development is that decision makers are so far removed from stakeholders that sometimes their solutions are not best placed to solve their issues. Interacting with the women of SEWA during our weekly workshops enabled me to view the beauty of the co-creation process where they could highlight what their struggles are, and what would be needed to solve them.

Top down policy making is very important, but there needs to be a bridge in how community is looped into the process to shape the process.

Starting, no matter how small is better than nothing at all

We are living at a time, where there seems to be a lot on the development agenda. Across the world, there seems that there is something that needs fixing and at times some of these issues feel impossible to completely resolve. It is easy to live in a first best solution world, where we don’t act and wait for the stars to align in order to act, or feel like the solution has to be grand, and large for it to have significant impact.

Working with Imago, enabled me to see how small changes, make a huge difference and have ripple effects much later on. They began their work with Rudi, a produce aggregation, processing and selling organization that is part of SEWA in 2014, with just a few women. They walked with the women to help them improve their rural distribution network, create greater value add and increase sales. Just 2 years later they were working with over 2000 women, and had scaled to 3 regions, and 8 processing centres. It did take time to see results and for scale to be achieved, but in the beginning, it seemed like nothing was moving. Great things do take time to build and are not so easy to start,but starting from somewhere no matter how difficult it seems is always a better way.



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