Economy and Eco Systems : A Tight Link

Ecosystems are indispensible for the survival of humans. if the biological diversity in our world is disappearing at this pace, we will soon eliminate the basis of our future existence and also the future economy. Hence it's essaintial that all stakeholders join hands and pool resources and efforts to protect global environment.



Economy and ecology are interdependent in each other hence a constant loss of biological diversity is major concern of business as it risks of increasing procurement costs, transportation costs. New government regulation and changing customer preferences also impact business. Bio-diversity is influenced with emotions and also innovation potential, hence offers businesses new opportunities and competitive adavantages.



Hence its important corporations take biodiversity management into their product planning and projects to ensure success in business while protecting biodiversity. The procument, production, marketing, sales and distribution, R & D and HR departments develop activities in sites and facilities, supply chains and material, prodcution and manufacturing processes and transport and logistics and personal which impact bio-diversity. Impact happen in bio-diversity are habitat change, Polution, climate change, invasive species, over exploitation. The business impacts are costs, brand vaue, prices, risk migitation and innovation. Combining thease impacts in a positive manner can help sustainable business development.





Using large amounts of energy, raw material, transport that emits carbaon, businesses impact heiavily on bio-diversity. The new constructions for office buildings, manufacturing facilities change habitats. If a wetland is used for a construction site, it will destroy the habitat and increse emitting of greenhouse gasses. Extracting rock from querries ploutes air and creates lung sickness among animals and humnas. Mutsui Sumitomo constructed a roof top garden of 7000 m2 in their corporate head quaters, in Tokyo.

Supply of raw materials and supply chain management need to incorporate bio-diversity ideas. large extraction of certiain material can change eco-system. Wood, Food, Fish, mineral industries need to re-consider their business practices. Product or service design need to reduce negative impacts on environment. This can be done increasing substituting, reducing and recycling options. . Positive effects can be created by using materials that contributes to the environmental conservation. Combining part of sales to a particular project is an idea.

Manufacturing emmits waste water, greenhouse gases and hazardous material that negatively impact biological diversity. The production processes needs to be optimized through improved process designs to reduce raw materials and energy needs, that reduce production costs. sustainable fish farms make less impact on environment than marine fishing.


Water is essential and scarce good. Rain water harwesting and storage in underground cisterns and collecting tanks, can reduce water required for manufacturing. A Brazilian organic sugar producer developed a new green production system, replacing traditional burnt cane harvesting which lead to biodiversity levels 23 times higher than in conventional sugarcane farms.

Transportation in business leads to the emission of greenhouse gases and dust and impact micro habitats. Increasing transportation may take invasive species to new habitats and displace native species. climate change also can modify behavior of species, reproduction, competitiveness and feeding relationships, leading to shifts of habitats.

The employees of the organisation need to train on bio diversity management to help their decision making. Their volunteering time help protect biological diversity in the neighbershoods. It can also strengthen business and employee identity. Fujitsu group staff take part in reforestation in Thailand, Borneo and in Vietnam. They have planted 1.18 million trees in 670 ha of land. Similarly there can be wide range of effects on bio-diversity and business success.


Reference : Hand Book of Bio Diversity Management

Six : The Social Change With In

Having involved in Shlpa Sayura rural community education and Nava Goviya agriculture development through Telecentres, the purpose of taking part in SIX in the City, Summer School Workshop in Singapore, was to expand our horizon integrating climatic change into our work, so that we can enlarge the impact of our social innovation at grass roots.



The Lively workshop at Singapore Mangement University (SMU))


The SIX (Social Innovation eXchange) event not only enlarged my knowledge but created new insights expanding our vision into new approaches how climatic change could impact all areas of social-economic and environment development activities we are doing at grass root Telecentres.

The workshop was greatly engaging, bringing in social innovation knowledge from all parts of the world, covering enormous number of issues, solutions, experiences and future insights that initiated a change with in.

What I would take back
I will be going back to Sri Lanka, and energized to share my knowledge acquired with my colleagues, partners and rural communities who work and help us make impact innovations to create visible and measurable social change.

The new people I met from Singapore, Australia, Europe, America and Canada is great resource of knowledge and a valuable network to create global partnerships to future social innovations. They are also a new form of happy and committed people driven by passion for social change and feeling good about it.

Thanking Note
usually thanking is done in personal notes, but this time I make a little change to express my personal thoughts in a much open manner, it probably is a result of attending openICT4D conference and workshop in Ottawa. The list is big, I start with Lien Center Team, who found Shilpa Sayura and gave Shilpa Sayura a new Mission, Young Foundation who supported a great amount of knowledge to emerge from within, All members who accommodated and exchanged their knowledge, All speakers, moderators who kept the workshop a lively one. First time in my life I never felt sleepy during 3 days workshop sessions. It was like begining of an un-ending journey of new learning.



Off Grid Solar Power application in Marian Bay Gallery, Singapore

The change
Taking part in SIX in the City 2010, Singapore, a new change happened. They are many. However among the most prominent is to expand our focus also to include urban community in poverty alleviation, integration of green approaches to our ICT4D designs making it a ICT4GD (ICT for green development), and to have a global focus emerging from our local experiences. Among the new approaches we want to change into are collaborative innovations, designing for scale and spread, network centric innovative organization, urban inclusion, changing cities we live in, “rurbanization” , Non profit to Enterprise approaches, incorporating climatic change, global and regional partnerships are a few. This kind of insights was not available to us before in Sri Lanka. As an emerging nation after many years of social struggle, we can make use of these to help change our grass root initiatives, in small and little but effective ways both in 15000 villages, 26 cities and 150 towns. The challenge is to build a social innovators collaborative network of people and organizations with a new shared vision representing each level of the social entities of Communities, Govenment and Business to initiate a social change to address 21st century challenges that we are facing and survive in the catastrophes in time to come. One of the greatest lessons learned at SIX was “Go ahead and do it” .

It’s the core social change with in.



Rain water fed, vertical garden at Mariana bay Gallery, Singapore



Niranjan Meegammana
Shilpa Sayura Foundation
Sri Lanka
http://www.shilpasayura.org

Impact of openness in grassroot empowerment

I witnessed this year Murali Krishna winning e-INDIA 2010 Award for best Telecentre initiative for the project AraviKalanjam e-SDI project he implemented. He was the youngest and probably represented smallest entity among award recipients. The goodness of the project is that it involved more than 500 students in a digital local language content competition. Many students who took part had not used ICT before. The project involved training, content creation be students and hosting. As I closely observed the project, Murali Krishna went through many challenges from beginning to end. He addressed his problems creating partnerships. His openness made partnerships work. Last moment he had to fly in business class to receive the award in Hyderabad. In my point of view Murali Represents the success of Sri Lanka Telecentres, a milestone of Sri Lanka ICT4D movement where an actual grass rooter reached helm though ICT4D.

Background
In 2006 I met Murali Krishna of Haldummulla Nenasala, a humble Telecentre operator and an energetic youth. He partnered with us to implement Shilpa Sayura pilot. Our partnership became strong during Regional Impact Team Assignment of Uva Province given by ICTA. We were able to create an open participatory platform called E3, where grass roots Telecentre operators could emerge as local leaders, develop them self, create impact in their communities and achieve heigher goals.

Our capacity building included a special training on project design and implementation. As a result 5 Telecentres were able to win grants from ICTA e-Society Development (e-SDI) initiative. We assisted in developing proposals, advised in implementation issues but they made the efforts for successfull completion and impact. The E3 development initiative we implemented in 60 Telecentres in Uva province helped developing many Telecentre champions finally won e-INDIA 2009 Award. Murali Krishna accepted the award together with me representing multi-stake holder partnership initiative of Uva Province Project E3 (RIT 2008/2009).

E3 - 4: A Lesson from e-India 2009 Awards

The case
The case of Murali Krishna is worthy of further study. What made his inspiration? What were the challenges faced and how they were overcome? It will help us to learn and knowledge we acquire can guide us to replicate and develop other grass root youth in similar way. I believe in this process openness in inclusion, collaboration and partnerships may have played a major part of development leading to this is a measurable Impact.

The significance of Murali Krishna’s award is that it shows how Telecentres can help developing of grass root youth leadership emergence and how they can reach higher goals to create benefits to the community around them and bring fame and recognition to the marginalized societies they represent. In this context our learning will definitely challenge theoretical development models we tend to follow, without knowing actutal possibilities and influencing us to change our approaches making development more open and inclusive reality.

So we can believe!
Telecentres can empower people throgh openness!

My Research Papers 2007- 2010

http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/1_Shilpa_Sayura_2007.pdf
http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/2_Shilpa_Sayura_else.pdf
http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/3_srilanka_india_elearning.pdf
http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/4_e3-e-India.pdf
http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/5_Knowledge_Through_Cables.pdf
http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/6_E3_SI_M&E_CSSL_2.1.pdf
http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/7_ICT4D_Up_scaling_and_Replication-paper4.1.pdf
http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/8_knowledge-outside-classrooms1-pape4.pdf
http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/9_openICT4D_IDRC_paper_draft_4.0-1.pdf

Are local languages marginalized in ICT4D?

ICT4D has created a platform for people to be embraced in knowledge. When e Sri Lanka project initiated , it helped creating a community of people who contributed to local language technology development. Due to the differences of local scripts, technologies designed for roman script like languages (English) were not directly usable for local languages. The ICT4D path of local language is not easy. It's not simply a matter of money money. Commitment is important success factor. It took several years to convince Microsoft to include Sinhala Language support in WindowsThe popular databases still not do not index local languages properly. The support for local languages is not guaranteed when someone buys software. Shilpa Sayura a Local Lanaguge e Learning project started in 2005, just getting consolidated. This could be common issue in over thousands of local language used across the world.




It can be thought as "fair enough" to for the technological developments to focus on English language as it is widely spread around the world and has a bigger market. However countries like Sri Lanka 95% of the people are not English users. In numbers 15 million people do not use English. They don't understand the meaning of "Global warming" or "HIV AIDS" or "Women Empowerment". 9 out of 10 have no idea of Millennium Goals. In rural societies it could be 10 out of 10. The messages are not reaching the bottom of the pyramid.

In Sri Lanka we are proud to have 50% of the population is using mobile phones. Unfortunately people only talk and send SMSs in local words written in English characters. It's good for asking "How are you ?" like expressions, But can not be considered as a way of giving, sharing and tranfering of knowledge. 90% of people can't find about weather, bus or train schedules as information is not available in local languages. In the open source world there is no open source mobile browser that supports local languages. It is a major proprietary domain. For Nokia, a Langauge spoken by 15 million people is a tiny market. Someone may consider it as fair enough in a shrinking global economic environment. In a Disney movie a wonderfull character named Horton says "A person is a person no mater how small they are". I belive in it. How small a community is a community what ever language they use. It's belived that over 10,000 languages used in the World, But how many of them are represented in ICT?

If we make an on-line scan for ICT4D projects implemented during fast 5 years, how many of them targeted local languages communities is valuable question to answer. If ICT4D social investments have not benefitted local language users at the bottom of the pyramid; can we consider the our achievements as success of ICT4D? One major barrier in local language technologies development is that, a person who is able to communicate in English, no longer has local language concerns and the people who need it are not able to communicate in English to the global investment decision makers who don't understand local languages. In my opinion at least 90% of the people in bottom of the pyramid are excluded from knowledge revolution enabled by ICT4D due to local language issues. This is also one major drawback of telecentre sustainability efforts too. Local lanaguage technology and content initiatives lacks sustainable support. It's more than one time development. It's a continues process of upgrading as technologies change.

Developing ICT infrastructure will spread hardware and access but not essaintial knowledge needs to make the change. This problem is not visible at higher levels and the details of the ground zero is lost as it moves up in decision ladder and most things important to bottom of the pyramid is dropped or considered unimportant at the summit.

There is a major gap between marginalized societies using local languages and communities in developed world as they are not able to communicate due to language barrier. Therefore knowledge society seems to fade at language barriers and becomes different versions of an illusion from both ends. If development efforts really aimed at grass roots, we are unable to exclude grass root languages. It may not be easy to solve this problem single handed for global development investments work for poor people. If inclusion is the global development agenda, it must begin serving the local needs rather than global wants. This seems a hypothesis in my experiences.



Education, Agriculture, Health, Economy like areas of rural life can be improved by emphasizing on development of local language technologies and knowledge and make them open for sharing across the developing world. It's time to look at ICT4D more openly on cases what doesn't fit in box rather than selecting what fits in pre-designed boxes. It's the only way to use ICT4D to improve rural societies who are not benefited with top ten global languages. Hence new ICT4D ideas should take local language as a multiplying factor for opening the global development in an effective manner.